My _____ Is Better than Yours!

Neil Irwin at The New York Times has a sad little piece on the pissing matches between economics departments.

Why is a newspaper like the Times concerned in the slightest over which economics department is best? What does that mean? It's clear why Stanford or Harvard or MIT would be concerned -- donor dollars. But nobody would suggest that X being best means that every economist at X is better than any economist at Y, or that all the work emerging from X is better than any work from Y.

And why is it the people that make one better? It's the obsession with star names that leads less wealthy schools to spend fortunes building a handful of superstar departments, spending fortunes on a handful of faculty. Do the students benefit? Do junior faculty? Is there better funding for any but the superstars? Harvard, Stanford and a handful of others can buy almost anyone they please. But NYU or Berkeley -- outstanding schools with outstanding economics departments -- can't. Why not create a better overall climate for students and faculty and worry less about the superstars?

Isn't it the quality of work coming out that matters? Certainly, the work is tied to the people, but if research is the real standard, then economists and the reporters who follow them around like little puppies might do well to consider some history. Twenty five or thirty years ago, many would likely have said that Chicago's was the 'best' department. Now, many would say that much of the work done at Chicago was politically driven hokum. (And who would now deny that political ideology drives an enormous part of economics?)

It's telling that in no natural science would this kind of chest beating take place. There are tempests in teapots over the 'best' physics or biology department and there is something sense to saying one is better than they other, but few worry so much about status because the work is the standard. By contrast, economics (and political science) seem to be little more than personality cults.

Property Rights in the New Glorious Not-Quite-Revolution

My guess is that many glitterati economists and political scientists at places like Stanford and Harvard are couching the TPP in terms of "property protections" (among which intellectual property is currently the most popular). By the same token that the "Glorious Revolution" supposedly marked a milestone in protecting property from the interference of a national leviathan (making possible the English revolutions in finance and industry), now restrictions on international leviathans (or national ones with international influence) will -- if you drink Obama's Kool-Aid -- promote revolutions in international commerce. With the TPP, international players will have further incentives to innovate and trade because they will be more confident of retaining the gains from their effort.... Or something like that. 

John Roemer wrote a nice survey essay in 2011: "The Ideological and Political Roots of American Inequality". He suggests that micro-economic theory has turned from focusing on the coordinating functions of markets to focusing on markets as devices for harnessing incentives (modeled in the theoretical tool of this time -- game theory). So politicians and executives who want to further line their own pockets now have a theoretical justification for opposing policies that might be deemed to interfere with the incentives of market rewards (especially any redistributive policy).

This serves a convenient dual purpose. First, since the middle class and poor are "takers, not makers," the effect on incentives for them is irrelevant, neatly excluded from the 'scientific' program. Second, redistribution effected by markets is okay (it's 'natural'), but redistribution effected by the leviathan is distortionary and depresses incentives. Regulations, environmental protections, loosening intellectual property protections, and so on, all involve government action that will weaken owners' property claims and effectively redistribute down the economic ladder. This also explains why we are seeing an explosion in conservatives and corporations appealing to rights.

Main Currents of Political Science and Economics — Over a Cataract

Duke professor Jedediah Purdy highlights a NY Times essay by Molly Worthen, particularly the following passage:

"The left can’t talk openly about ideology, while the right pretends to ignore its own identity politics. The country’s political conversation is boring and unsatisfying precisely because its unspoken rules forbid politicians from acknowledging what is really going on and encourage them to talk past one another. 

"The right has so thoroughly captured the terms of economic debate that American liberals — uniquely in the Western world — champion cultural issues like same-sex marriage equality while avoiding serious confrontation with the structural sources of socio-economic inequality. Their ideological cowardice has left them turning sensible reform proposals like single-payer health insurance into the Frankenstein’s monster of government-subsidized private enterprise that is the Affordable Care Act."

Before the elections, the Times was running a side by side comparison of several models predicting the outcome of the campaigns. I haven't found an account of how those models actually shaped up in the actual outcome.

One way or another, the "conversation is boring and unsatisfying" also captures something about the state of political science exemplified in those models. It's badly missing something. And I don't think it's any accident that it has bought so completely into the methods of the main current of economics that so badly missed critical trends of the past 35 years (not just the past 7 years).