Monday, December 8, 2014

Peter Dorman — Economics and Ideology, Terribly Muddled

With great resolve and all the best intentions, I began reading “Political Language in Economics” by Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu. This is the research version of the journalism version published by 538, both referenced by Tyler Cowen. 
But I stopped at p. 8, wondering how it is possible for three obviously intelligent people to jointly pen such an arbitrary, implausible and internally inconsistent theory of the role of ideology in economic research.
Maybe economists should leave the sociology to sociologists. In fact, socioeconomics and economic sociology are existing disciplines. Sociologists have developed the terminology and methods for dealing with issues like ideology. Economists apparently need to acquaint themselves more with this work, which goes back to Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. See, for example, Frank Dobbin, Economic Sociology.

Econospeak
Peter Dorman, Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College

3 comments:

Jan said...
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Jan said...

New York Times May 1987
"Mr. Myrdal, the 1974 Nobelist in economics... whose 1944 book, ''An American Dilemma,'' helped to destroy the ''separate but equal'' racial policy in the United State
Mr. Myrdal has been called the leading economist and social scientist of his epoch. Statesman, reformer, dissenter, pacifist and foe of inequality, an architect of the Swedish welfare state, he literally left his mark in a footnote to history - the famous footnote 11 to the United States Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Listing sources to prove that schools could not be ''separate but equal'' because separation implied and enforced inferiority, the Court said, ''See generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma 5/81944).'' ''I am often considered almost not a part of the profession of Establishment economists,'' he observed in an essay. ''I am even referred to as a sociologist. And by that economists usually do not mean anything flattering. Another, in some respects like-minded, rebel, Galbraith, who in addition writes a beautiful and forcible English, is often handled even more rudely by being classified by his as a journalist ''An American Dilemma,'' helped to destroy the ''separate but equal'' racial policy in the United States
A classicist, Mr. Myrdal held that ideals, cultural attitudes and social structures were primordial in shaping economic ideas. But he was at first fascinated by the abstract mathematical models coming into fashion in the 1920's and helped found the Econometric Society, based in London.
Later, however, he accused the movement of ignoring the problem of distribution of wealth in its obsession with economic growth, of using faulty statistics and substituting Greek letters for missing data in its formulas and of flouting logic. ''Correlations are not explanations,'' he wrote, ''and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.'' http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/18/obituaries/gunnar-myrdal-analyst-of-race-crisis-dies.html?src=pm&pagewanted=2

Jan said...
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