The “cage match,” as Levitt put it, between the likes of John Cochrane and Eugene Fama against economists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, continues apace.
A recent New Yorker piece by John Cassidy, “After the Blowup” (gated), asks what it means to be a “Chicago school” economist at this moment in history, and to what degree Chicago-school economics may be responsible for the financial crisis.
Richard Posner, unsurprisingly, is the hero of the article. But Fama, as Cassidy notes, was “genial” in his dismissal of Posner’s analysis; and Fama’s “equanimity was unshaken” even when discussing Krugman’s fierce criticisms. “My attitude is this,” he said. “If you are getting attacked by Krugman, you must be doing something right.”
Is there any other academic field in which standard decorum is valued so low?
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The reason there are multiple mystery novels about murders at the Modern Language Association convention is that English Ph.D.-holders are comparably lacking in decorum. However, since postmodern literary criticism is not suspected of having caused the collapse of the global economy, the in-fighting doesn’t make the news so often.
Patricia Limerick’s piece in the NYTimes book review a few years ago about why academics tend toward arrogance and pugilism applies. Of course, the business arena has its own gladiators. I’m just glad to be over 40 and made happy by gardening, 2 little kids and two little dogs.
Every discipline has in-fighting. That’s because people aren’t debating to get to the truth. Rather, they’re involved in ‘debate theater’, with the sole intention of winning the contest. They aren’t involved in a serious search for truth.
That’s what all capitalism is about, Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’, even in academic “truth seeking” disciplines.
Ad hominem attacks are a sure sign of complete bogosity in a (self-described) profession. See such works as the Lexicography of Musical Invective.
In other words, economists are just mountebanks, poseurs, phonies. This confirms it.
I don’t think “academic” has anything to do with it. There are here basic ideological issues which get worked out through various theoretical and interpretative strategies–the math being mere math, after all, and all data requiring modeling. This doesn’t make everything “equal” in a vulgar relativist sense. It means that there’s no easy separation of theory and ideology, nor fact and value, in economics; it is a value-laden science relying on many bounding realities of human cognition and history. This can reduce to “gotcha” in a puerile way, but is better thought of as a dimension of economic theory which all have to deal with wisely– meaning producers and consumers of theory alike. Caveat lector!
Krugman is a fraud. If you want a real economists that have predicted this collapse, and can forecast other coming economic Armageddons, listen to Peter Schiff and other Austrians.
An economist friend at a samll univerity in the midwest suggested that “The achedemic wars were so fierce because the fruits were so small”.
Yes, Political Science.
see: http://americanandcomparativejobs.blogspot.com/