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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Those of you who have heard of these men before already likely know what they have in common: they are all professors of economics at George Mason University. This is not a coincidence. Rather, it is the direct result of a conscious choice by George Mason, more than 50 years ago, to zig where other universities zagged, snapping up brilliant free-market economists while their ideas were unpopular in the broader academic market. Fittingly for an economics department, they found and exploited an niche that was undervalued by academia writ large, and were rewarded with a string of brilliant economists, including Nobel Prize winners, and a culture of contrarianism and intellectual curiosity that persists to the present.

The existence of the GMU economics department is a boon to academic and intellectual culture, and has provided serious benefits to me personally, even though I have never attended and most likely will never attend George Mason University, even though I stubbornly and resolutely reject many tenets of the libertarianism of so many of its finest thinkers. It did not spring up by chance. It sprang up out of a conscious, ideologically influenced decision to provide an alternative to the culture embraced by the great majority of universities around it.

Has there ever been a putatively left-wing economics department at any university? I think GMU is trying to copy the success of the Chicago School or models itself after it , which was/is a huge success. Neoclassical economic positions are more likely to attract funding and prestige compared to more heterodox alternatives. Many Nobel Prizes in economics were downstream of the ideas conceived or popularized by the Chicago School.

I dream of diversity between institutions: one in which George Mason economists argue with Harvard critical race theorists, where Chicago Law and Berkeley Law hash out serious disagreements, where to attend one university means to be immersed in its particular culture, with a range of cultures on offer between different universities that is as wide as productively possible.

This seems as productive as having mechanical engineers debate CRT. In the first example you're talking across fields/domains, whereas the law example is across the same domain. Diversity of viewpoints should not mean having to shoehorn diversity where it's unproductive.

Amherst's economics department is fairly infamous for being left-wing/Marxist.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/24/inside-the-offbeat-economics-department-that-debunked-reinhart-rogoff/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein

The University of Utah's econ department has been called Marxist pretty often. I mean UofU's raison d'etre is to be the anti-BYU so it kind of makes sense:

https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2018/04/16/us-economics-department-marxist-or-diverse/

Has there ever been a putatively left-wing economics department at any university?

You must be asking specifically about the US right? Because there's still a bunch of Marxians around in Europe and since they are "heterodox" they tend to to the exact same thing described here.

I suppose if you could ask Mises he would say that all economics departments are left wing, including his own.

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