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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (76778)	10/12/2004 4:02:40 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793955

Prestopundit - ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS randomly polled by The Economist overwhelmingly favor tax increases and back John Kerry's economic policies over those of George Bush. These scholars see Kerry -- the candidate who plans to increase federal spending by something like $2 trillion dollars -- as the one with better policies for promoting fiscal discipline. They also favor Kerry on medical policy, energy policy, and retirement policy -- policies which increase the scope of the central government, decrease the decision power of individual agents, and ultimately favor bureaucrats over market mechanisms. Perhaps it's no surprise that 80% of those with an eye on a job in Washington would prefer working in a Democratic administration. As I've here noted before, many top economic departments have a 5-1, 10-1 or even 20-1 Democrat- to- Republican composition, making the economics faculty only marginally more diverse than the English, Sociology, or History departments on those same campuses. The dusty old myth assumes that academic economics is overwhelmingly populated by free-market Republicans. Sadly, the truth is that economics departments are overwhelmingly populated by second-rate physics, math, and engineering students who were originally attracted by the math and data games which substitute for economic thought in today's academic journals. These folks are what the American Economic Association special committee on graduate education has called "idiot savants" -- they don't actually know that much about what happens in a real economy or even how it works. And they certainly aren't richly schooled in economic theory -- e.g. the history of economic thought has been removed from the curriculum and most economist today have never read the work of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or any other economist you can name off the top of your head. What they do day in and day out is a lot of math and lots of "blackboard economics" (see Ronald Coase) -- stuff premised on "simplifying assumptions" which make it inapplicable to the real world (e.g. the constant use of mathematical uncertainty rather than epistemic uncertainty). So in crucially important ways, a great mass of these folks aren't particularly good economists -- they've internalized a lot of mathematics but they exhibit no sound understanding of the severe limitations of all this mathematics, a problem which comes to a head when you closely study the singularly massive failure by economists to coherently use this mathematics to explain anything (for some sense of the nature and scope of this failure see the work of Alex Rosenberg or Bruce Caldwell). The things which would lead one to favor markets over Democrats in a robust fashion are missing from the mind-set of perhaps most academic economists -- a deep understanding of economics theory, a hands-on familiarity with the real world, a genuine mastery of public policy specifics, and last (but not least) a multi-disciplinary framework for imagining the institutional foundations upon which markets and goverments rest. Lacking these, and having only their math and perhaps a "Leftist Arts" education to fall back on, it shouldn't surprise that the vast majority of economists from the ivory tower would prefer John Kerry-- not only in charge of public policy and the economy -- but also as boss. hayekcenter.org

To: LindyBill who wrote (76778)	10/12/2004 11:37:35 AM
From: Bridge Player	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

One very disadvantaged school district in Yonkers (NY) is doing well on the state standardized exams, and enquiring minds would like to know why: There are no enquiring minds in the midst of the NEA. Those who already care to know what works, know. The good teachers on the firing line know. They continue to fight the culture, the kids peers, the parents more concerned with Johnnie's self-esteem, and the administrators when and where they can. In too often a losing battle.