Congratulations to Fellow UMass Economist(s)

Thomas Herndon is getting a lot of attention for his critical replication paper, that attacks the data / methods of a paper by Harvard's Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. 

 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html

Those of us (and this includes most of my readers I imagine) who find policy implications based on econometric analysis in single papers are not terribly surprised to find errors in papers such as Reinhart and Rogoff's.  That said, it is rare that the mainstream is forced to listen to our critiques. That coupled with the fact that Thomas' work has significant implications for austerity programs and governments the world over, this is a major achievement!
Well done and congrats Tom!

Crossing Boundaries of Economic Commentary

Albeit for very different reasons:
Respected colleague, David Ruccio, and Harvard's answer to Hitler, Greg Mankiw have the exact same quote on their respective blogs this morning. 
View Ruccio's here
View Mankiw's here
What is this world coming to?


PS, I am not claiming that N. Gregory Mankiw is anti-Semitic.  The reference to Hitler is as one who knowingly indoctrinates his followers with false and dangerous information to serve his own purposes. 

Engaging with the Mainstream, but not Engaged to it: A Response to Dan MacDonald.

This post is a response to a recent post on the blog Imagining History by Dan MacDonald.

I need to start by mentioning the title. Engaged AGAINST the Mainstream would be far more impressive. "Engaging with the mainstream" only really refers to those that have it wrong (implicit in Dan's post from my reading). That is, those people who use mainstream methods to ask leftist questions. Those who build alternative frameworks to attack the mainstream are engaged against the mainstream in my opinion. These posts are concerned with both types of people.

Moving on:
I cannot dispute Dan's conclusion that of those around us in the UMass Amherst Economics department, as a general rule the younger the person the more they seem to engage in what I consider to be mainstream methodology AND IDEOLOGY. Certainly mainstream methods have not become more "correct" in the last 40 years, is it fair to imply as Dan does that these methods and ideas have become more hegemonic (even in our department)? Certainly it is well documented that social sciences have become more empirical in methodology over this period. The question then becomes; does the perception of younger heterodox economists engaging with more mainstream methods really hold water, or are they just becoming more cough* "analytically rigorous" than their predecessors?

What is more interesting to me is what actually makes an economist heterodox?
I don't view people using mainstream methodology to answer "leftist" questions as radical economists, just liberal mainstream people and our department is full of them.

Why then do I give primacy to methodology? I view people using non-traditional methods because of a philosophical problem with empirical analysis as far more radical (heterodox) than those using hegemonic methodology to ask socially progressive questions. My reasons for this are too complex to address here and will be addressed further at a later date.

MacDonald's conclusion suggests that thinks along a similar line. The suggestion that people who are not engaged to the mainstream will receive better jobs (historically) than self styled heterodox people who use mainstream methods certainly is true in the history of our department. Does this hold in a wider sample? I think those who are engaged with the mainstream as opposed to against it never were and never will be heterodox and thus we have no evidence of them in heterodox positions.

As soon as they do get a job, these "heterodox economists" will apply their mainstream models to questions that are not the socially progressive ones they pretended to care about in grad school, but rather the traditional questions that are published in mainstream economics journals, that will result in tenure and a meaningless existence as another second rate economist. (Prove me wrong people.)

Should we engage with the mainstream? No. Should we use mainstream methods to engage against the mainstream? Historically people seem to fail at this and end up just as fringe members of said mainstream when they try. Should we bother with the mainstream at all? No? Should we spend our time making what is now radical more widely accepted? I would say yes, it is all we can do.

Thanks Dan, great post.

Engaging Conservative Economics

The inspiration for this post came from a recent exchange on the list serve of graduate students in the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (many of whom also blog, a list of these blogs can be found HERE).

I will not summarize the email thread for reasons that should become clear in the following post.

I feel that far to much effort on the part of so called "heterodox economists" is spent criticizing what is often referred to as "mainstream" or "neoclassical" economics.

I do not dispute that critical analysis of the mainstream is an important part of our task as radical economists. The very nature of the terms mainstream and radical (or heterodox) imply that their theories are more commonly accepted than ours, and thus are more widely taught, and unfortunately accepted.

The flip side of this which is commonly ignored by many of my colleagues is that the very process of criticism legitimizes neoclassical economic theories as being worth our time. The process of criticism relies on the implicit assumption that these theories are worth the time to think about.

A person presenting a theory that human civilization started on jupiter and migrated to earth when jupiter was full would find their basic intelligence criticized, not aspects within the theory that they are presenting (such as how people traveled through the solar system). This big picture approach needs to find a larger role withing radical economics. By accepting assumptions of the mainstream economic theories we are wasting valuable resources (time) that could (and I argue should) be spent further developing weak points in our own theories of the workings of the economy instead of implicitly validating equilibrium based nonsense.

Letter to a Colleague

The following is part of a comment I posted on another blog, Imagining History, but is a topic I will return to in the future here so I wanted to post it.
I feel that those of us outside of mainstream economics spend to much time teaching things we have already rejected. Part of this is necessary to keep our paychecks but part of it we do so we can feel superior to close minded mainstream economists. At the introductory level I think we need to do more of teaching Marxism as what is "right", not as an alternative theory.

Start Letter:

I feel that in many heterodox economics classes that I have taken, my education has suffered because a lot of focus and time has been given to the mainstream. If I thought that a thorough understanding of mainstream economics was worth while for me, then I would take a mainstream class, or attend grad school in a mainstream department for than matter. The more time we spend trying to thoroughly understand the mainstream the less time there is to study alternatives.

As a teacher, you have the power to have studied and rejected the mainstream ahead of time, so your students do not need to take the time to struggle with this in their first semester of economic history. If you believe the heterodox perspective holds more merit then you should teach only that. Otherwise you are placing heterodox theory at a natural disadvantage because mainstream courses do not take the time to go beyond a bare mention of Marx, Keynes, Kafka, etc.

It is within your job, hell it is your duty as an instructor to teach your students what YOU feel is the best course you can offer on economic history, using the best methodological approach, from your point of view that is.

If this means not doing the mainstream justice, so that you can spend the limited time that you have with your students giving a more thorough (non rigorous)course in economic history from a heterodox perspective, I would encourage you to do so. Plurality has many benefits, but within the confines of a single semester, in an undergraduate course, I would think you are better off teaching history from the perspective that you prefer.

That is unless you want the course to be a methodological survey of economic histories....which would a fantastic course but....maybe not at the undergraduate level, and the university may question why you have an s on the end of the word history in your course description.

As non-mainstream economists, beyond a basic understanding of the mainstream, why study in depth something that we think is "wrong"? We have rejected the mainstream without learning its nuances, certainly learning the finer points within the any theory just makes its contradictions come even more to the surface? (To be fair this point is as true regarding Marxism as it is any other theory)

There are only so many hours in the day (even fewer for those of us who blog). I would encourage you to spend the few you have with your students teaching things that they cannot get from any cookie cutter text on economic history.