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Pastimes : Ask Mohan about the Market -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Hunt who wrote (17158)	11/29/1998 4:45:00 PM
From: Wildstar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18056

Economists in academia ain't too bright: Egg-Faced Economists GeorgiaPolitics.com 11-29-98 Jon Perdue Egg-Faced Economists Jon Perdue 11-18-98 Ronald Reagan once quipped in a press conference that he planned to smear some egg on his face and celebrate Halloween as a liberal economist. During Reagan's first term, liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote: "The Soviet system has made great material progress ...partly the Russian system succeeds because in contrast with Western economies it makes full use of its manpower." The same attitude of red-envy for the Soviet sys tem persisted through Reagan's terms, right up to the final months of communism's collapse. In 1989 liberal economist Lester Thurow wrote of the Soviet Union: "Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the U.S." Both Galbraith and Thurow both remain solidly atop the economic elite's A-list. The American Economics Association recently devalued a prestigious award by giving it to an economist who claimed to have discovered that the law of demand did not apply to the labor market. The economist purported to have found that a hike in the minimum wage would result in employers demanding more unskilled labor. If the economist had claimed to have found that a higher price for any other commodity resulted in a demand for more of it, he would have been laughed out of the economics profession. From the rise of Keynesian panaceanomics to the grandiose social and economic planning of the New Deal/Great Society to the so-called "Asian Miracle," ample data has been accumulated on all economic systems to debunk those that lack merit. But a cottage industry, if they can be understood by those who populate them, has been created to discredit market theories that would seem obvious to any freshman economics student. Economists who understand and base their work on simple, free-choice models of economic exchange have often been drowned out by the voices of economist-mountebanks whose novel new approaches to social and economic experimentation have eventually succeeded only in transferring wealth to themselves, while leaving the larger populations that have to live under these systems to pick up the pieces later. As quantum mechanics has done for the study of physics, economic study based on observing the elementary tran sactions of consumers based on fundamental laws of individual choice has given us the proper picture of how the economy works and how not to impede it. Yet, like the singularity in quantum physics, all known laws seem to break down inside the event horizon of leftist academia. Unlike the high-tech industries of commerce and academia, where technology and scientific discovery is driven by those most skilled in theory and experimentation, economic policy is still driven by those most skilled in rhetoric . In economic academia, where tenure and publishing contracts still abound, the most common characteristic of economic professors is that they have all been previously duped by wrong-headed utopian economic schemes from communist central planning to the Fabian socialism of today. But Ivy League economics departments are not peopled by those whose predictive records bear the greatest historical accuracy. Ivory Tower intellectual capital is acquired by demonstrating polemical proficiency in thwarting the public acceptance of laissez faire economic theories. And that is aided by the establishment of an intellectual oligarchy, with which academes shield themselves from the embarrassment of repeated refutation. When the entirety of the peers with which professors collaborate share identical views, regardless of their historical validity, academic inquiry becomes institutional advocacy instead. Such is the current situation when the White House Council of Economic Advisors are those plucked from academia who had most loudly shouted the praises of the president's most favored vote-buying redistribution schemes. When the president utilized those supposed economic studies saying that raising the minimum wage would not reduce jobs for those at the bottom of the economic ladder he should have been laughed off the stage. Instead, all that was heard was an acquiescent "Hmmmmmmm?,"as if the Grand Unified Theory of economics might now be within reach. Academics in any other course of study who touted a notion as contrary to the basic laws of their field would have lost all credibility and just as soon all public voice. Yet the pair who conducted this study were paraded as economic heroes to help lobby for passage of the higher minimum wage. Earlier, when two physicists claimed, prior to peer review, to have produced cold fusion in the laboratory, and were discovered to have unrepeatable results, they were both banished to shameful careers as corporate shills in foreign countries. If a similar standard were observed among the economic elite, the want ads would soon overflow with pleas for newly opened professorships and we would reap a good lesson in the economics of overvalued goods.