What kind of person becomes an economist? If, like many, you see professional economists as pro-market fanatics, you will assume an origin story along the following lines: You grow up in a well-off, center-right or right-wing home. As a teen-ager, you grow curious about the best way to rationalize your center-right or right-wing convictions. You’re an
Also a Berkeley undergrad here. Nothing like Jan de Vries’ late medieval / early modern economic history to teach you how overwhelmingly important small increases in productivity and growth are, compared to at-best ephemeral things like equality.
I don't know if the empirical evidence bares this out. Economists are very free-trade, left wingers are not. That seems like a significant policy shift. An international comparison would be enlightening here as well.
Since you have classroom experience, what percent of students do you think actually believe what they learn? When I was a student I observed that all the students digested the material but many dismissed it as "theoretical."
Your essay encouraged me to reread Professor Stigler's 1959 article "The Politics of Political Economists." Unless I am misreading or misunderstanding, I believe you are both in substantial agreement--studying economics moves people to the right, on average. Stigler cites Hansen, Seymour Harris, Galbraith, all of Harvard, and Wesley Mitchell as, perhaps, exceptions proving the rule. Although, he also argues that once Marx began to study economics, he too moved to the right.
To get As requires a lot of repeating back what your professors want to hear. If you share the same biases as your professors, then that is less of an issue than if you don’t, controlling for intelligence and conscientiousness. For those who don’t share the biases of their professors, it helps to have a more agreeable personality type. Being disagreeable and not sharing the biases of your professors, on average, makes it harder to get As and get into grad school. At least that’s my observation.
These ideal types are representative of my experiences: the tempered left-winger is much more common than the committed right-wingers. There was a token right-winger (actually a Mont Pelerin classical liberal) in my university's economics department and the rest center-Democrat and leftwards of that.
Funny thing now when I reading your text, I am reminded of growing up with a father who was inspired both by for example Olof Palme and Kropotkin, and by Milton Friedman and liberal ideas
Thanks for sharing your story :). Personally, I went from being left-liberal and progressive liberal to being more social libertarian and inte crypto anarchism, since I work with and promote cryptocurrency, blockchain, decentralisation. A strange feeling today, since the saying is that as people get older they become more right-wing and conservative :p
Bologna, Italy undergrad here. Perfectly describes my current situation. I once was a piketty enthusiast, then i met this friend of mine which in just an afternoon roasted my views so much that i became lib. really relate to this
That describes me pretty accurately ... except that I fell into a Friedman-Sowell rabbithole a couple of years after university and changed my views.
Also a Berkeley undergrad here. Nothing like Jan de Vries’ late medieval / early modern economic history to teach you how overwhelmingly important small increases in productivity and growth are, compared to at-best ephemeral things like equality.
I don't know if the empirical evidence bares this out. Economists are very free-trade, left wingers are not. That seems like a significant policy shift. An international comparison would be enlightening here as well.
Since you have classroom experience, what percent of students do you think actually believe what they learn? When I was a student I observed that all the students digested the material but many dismissed it as "theoretical."
Your essay encouraged me to reread Professor Stigler's 1959 article "The Politics of Political Economists." Unless I am misreading or misunderstanding, I believe you are both in substantial agreement--studying economics moves people to the right, on average. Stigler cites Hansen, Seymour Harris, Galbraith, all of Harvard, and Wesley Mitchell as, perhaps, exceptions proving the rule. Although, he also argues that once Marx began to study economics, he too moved to the right.
To get As requires a lot of repeating back what your professors want to hear. If you share the same biases as your professors, then that is less of an issue than if you don’t, controlling for intelligence and conscientiousness. For those who don’t share the biases of their professors, it helps to have a more agreeable personality type. Being disagreeable and not sharing the biases of your professors, on average, makes it harder to get As and get into grad school. At least that’s my observation.
These ideal types are representative of my experiences: the tempered left-winger is much more common than the committed right-wingers. There was a token right-winger (actually a Mont Pelerin classical liberal) in my university's economics department and the rest center-Democrat and leftwards of that.
Funny thing now when I reading your text, I am reminded of growing up with a father who was inspired both by for example Olof Palme and Kropotkin, and by Milton Friedman and liberal ideas
Thanks for sharing your story :). Personally, I went from being left-liberal and progressive liberal to being more social libertarian and inte crypto anarchism, since I work with and promote cryptocurrency, blockchain, decentralisation. A strange feeling today, since the saying is that as people get older they become more right-wing and conservative :p
Bologna, Italy undergrad here. Perfectly describes my current situation. I once was a piketty enthusiast, then i met this friend of mine which in just an afternoon roasted my views so much that i became lib. really relate to this
So the average economist is less like the average Latin American rightwinger and more like the average Swede or Dutch person. Makes sense.