Paul Krugman:
What bothers me, and should bother you, about much of this debate is that it pretty clearly is not in good faith. Too many economists and commentators on economics are clearly playing for a political team; too many others are clearly playing professional reputation games. Their off-the-cuff reactions to policy issues were wrong and foolish, and I think they know in their hearts that they messed up; but instead of trying to remedy the fault, they’re trying to defend the property values of their intellectual capital.
And that really is a sin. This is not an academic game, where tempers run high because the stakes are so small. This really matters to millions of people, and refusing to think clearly because you don’t want any negative thoughts about the papers you and your friends have been writing the past few decades is unforgivable. [emphasis added]
"This is not an academic game."
"This really matters to millions of people."
The point that Dr Krugman makes here is invaluable. If only students were required to handwrite these two sentences a thousand times as a condition of their admission to an economics program, and were then required to repeat this exercise at the start of each academic year, maybe we'd all have a lot less semi-informed quasi-academic econ-speak with which to contend.
Besides the dilettantes who approach the subject with the same gravity that they'd bring to a crossword puzzle, we also mustn't forget the corporate water-carriers whose noise Dr Krugman and others so often lament.
Unfortunately, this battle is not new. Yann Giraud:
Yet, the same Paul Samuelson had written to his friend Alvin Hansen a couple of years before, in the midst of the Phillips curve controversy, the following sentence: "Milton F. is a bloody nuisance. In the end he is not right in his provocative stands, but it takes valuable time rebutting his arguments." He even added: "Having just returned from UCLA where (as in Virginia and Washington) the place is jumping with energetic libertarian nuts, I realize that so much of one's scientific life has to be occupied in sterile debate." [emphasis added]
Meh. Academics don't have a moral responsibility. Shit gets peer reviewed and filtered out. It may take time, but it happens. We really don't think Krugman approaches issues with a clear mind, now do we? Maybe at some point but certainly not now.
ReplyDelete'Academics don't have a moral responsibility.'
ReplyDeleteAre you serious? If so, then you've summed up the problem better than I could've hoped to. Your position is dreadful. One's morals may differ from those of another, but if want to pretend that anything we do can be totally non-normative, you're delusional.
Too many of us approach our subject with a heavy emphasis on abstract first principles. This would be an appropriate starting place if sufficient weight were then placed on empiricism. It's fine, for example, to believe that there exists a market-clearing price for natural gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing. What is not ok is to assume that the ex ante price is derived from supply and demand curves that fully incorporate all costs and benefits. To simply wave off doubts with the incantation 'supply and demand!' is not science; it's ideology at best, and mouthpieceing at worst. And cooking up a bunch of tautologies to justify the argument isn't economics; it's witchcraft.
Look, we've all got preconceptions. And most of us have principles. My preconceptions tell me something about the way the world works, and my principles guide my beliefs as to what is and isn't right. Where economists fail is to allow one or both of these to supersede evidence.