Tag: Jim Tankersley

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Republic of Science or Empire of Ideology?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Republic of Science or Empire of Ideology?: “[Jim Tankersley of] The Washington Post has a long story about Charles’ Koch’s attempt to influence the economics profession with massive donations…

…The Post’s article is titled ‘Inside Charles Koch’s $200 million quest for a ‘Republic of Science'”. This is a reference to a 1962 article by Michael Polanyi called ‘The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory’….The Post article’s author, Jim Tankersley, drily notes:

[Koch’s donation effort] raises the question of whether Koch has become, for university researchers, the sort of distorting force that Polanyi warns against.

Why yes. Koch is making a sustained, multi-hundred-million dollar effort to push the academic economics profession toward a libertarian ideology. This is a ‘Republic of Science’ to the same degree that North Korea is a ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’…. I don’t like it…. It sets back our understanding of the world when people try to flood any portion of academia with researchers whom they think will promote a certain set of conclusions. I don’t have much more to say than that, so here’s one of my favorite Feynman quotes:

Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming ‘This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!’ we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

A real ‘Republic of Science’ would focus on an open-minded search for truth, not the enshrinement of one pre-decided dogma.

Updates: I also thought this passage from Tankersley’s article was interesting:

None of the largest recipients of Koch dollars appear on a list of the most influential academic economic departments in the United States, as calculated by the research arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Only one professor who works at one of Koch’s most-supported centers cracks a similar list that calculates the top 5 percent of influential economists in the research community
Koch-funded researchers make a larger impact in the public arena. They frequently testify before Republican-led committees in Congress. Their work often guides lawmakers, particularly conservatives, at the state level in drafting legislation, and they have provided the foundations for judicial opinions that affect the economy on issues such as whether the government should intervene to stop large companies from merging.

It’s possible that the Koch doesn’t want to influence economic science itself, as much as he wants to sculpt its public-facing component. The end result could be two econ professions – a dispassionate, truth-seeking one occupying the upper levels of the ivory tower, at MIT and Princeton and Stanford, doing hard math things and careful honest data work that slowly trickles out through traditional media channels, and another in the lower-ranked schools, doing a slightly fancier version of the kind of political advocacy now done by conservative think tanks. The former would have the best brains and the best understanding of the real world, but the latter would have much more policy influence and impact on the wider intellectual world. This is different from the wholesale yoking of science to ideology that I was envisioning, but it also doesn’t seem like a pleasant vision of the future.

Must-read: Jim Tankersley: “The world has too many workers. Here’s one way to fix it”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read:I really do not like the “too many workers” framing: I vastly prefer either:

  • Too little public investment
  • Too little government purchases
  • Too little government debt
  • Too little risk-bearing capacity
  • Too little in the way of safe assets for savers to hold

But the argument seems 100% right to me:

Jim Tankersley: The world has too many workers. Here’s one way to fix it: “overcomplicating America’s economic challenges today…

…Maybe the problem is simple: too many workers. That is the argument made in a new paper released by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, which theorizes that the world economy is suffering from an oversupply of labor and too little demand for the goods and services those workers produce…. Daniel Alpert… [makes] Third Way’s latest effort to shape the liberal policy conversation in the 2016 presidential primaries. It does so in decidedly un-centrist fashion — by embracing a larger infrastructure spending program than Bernie Sanders does….

Alpert laments the ‘suddenness and extent of the integration of over 3 billion people into a global capitalist market, that really only hitherto consisted of about 800 million in the advanced economies.’ He argues that worker influx has triggered a wave of low-wage job creation in America. He notes that nearly half of the jobs created in the current recovery have come in traditionally low-wage sectors…. Intervening, he says, requires a ‘bold change in policy focus’ for the United States. Which is to say, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending program, at a time when Congress remains dead set against big new spending plans. Alpert estimates it would create 5.5 million jobs….

It might seem an unusual position for a centrist think-tank, outflanking the most liberal presidential candidate on the left. But Third Way officials argue it’s an economic imperative. ‘Whether it’s through some sort of spending deal, where you’re getting more money into infrastructure, or repatriation or some other means, you have to get this done’ in Congress, said Jim Kessler, the group’s senior vice president for policy. ‘That glut of worldwide labor is not going to go away, magically.’