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 here and there bits 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 -- see Donald Rumsfeld).

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.

UPDATE: Blogosphere reactions here, here, and here.

Scott Campbell from Blithering Bunny writes:

It was only after reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics that I started to get a feel for economics. More books like this need to be written, explaining the fundamentals of economics, and providing an overall perspective, with real-world applications. Hardly any academics that I know have any appreciation of how markets work, and some better intro books will help.

Some other good ones:

Free to Chose by Rose & Milton Friedman.

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell

Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

Hidden Order : The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman.

A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics: An Introduction to Competing Schools of Thought by Brian Snowdon, Peter Wynarczyk & Howard Vane.

UPDATE II: Edward Prescott, the new Nobel laureate in economics, is calling for bigger tax cuts. Posted by Greg Ransom