Paul Krugman - Ideology and Economics Jan.5, 2013

[Mira]

January 5, 2013, 8:37 am

Ideology and Economics

I’m in San Diego for the annual economics meetings, and am starting off this morning as a discussant of a paper by Roger Gordon and Gordon Dahl on the question of agreement versus disagreement among economists. (As far as I can tell, no public version of the paper is available yet).

Interestingly, Gordon and Dahl’s paper is empirical and quantitative. Their data come from the panel of economic experts put together by Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Each week since the fall of 2011, members of the panel have been asked whether they agree or disagree with a sample statement about economic affairs. These responses offer a quantitative measure of consensus or lack thereof on economic ideas; they can also be used to ask such questions as whether disagreements, when they occur, fall along a liberal/conservative divide.
And the picture Gordon and Dahl derive from this evidence is quite benign. On most issues, particularly where there is a lot of research, there is considerable consensus; and they can’t find evidence of ideological divides driving disagreement. Economics, they find, looks a lot like a normal field of scientific inquiry; to the extent that it seems otherwise, they suggest, it’s only because sometimes economists are working for politicians and are obliged to seem supportive.


for all of it go to:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/ideology-and-economics/

[Cary]

1. Interesting

I read a.book about anthropology and they too have been at each other's throats n a similar way.