Mario Rizzo’s recent letter in the Financial Times is spot-on:
The concentration of the profession of economics in the hands of “elite” schools is an intellectual tragedy (“Is economics in need of trustbusting?”, FT View, August 31).
The elite have closed the top journals to any ideas that are not formulated in “advanced” mathematical terms. They have told authors who are investigating the broader philosophical or methodological or history-of-economics topics to go to other journals that specialise in these subjects. What they are really saying is: yours is not top-level work and should go into inferior journals. It was not always this way. Certainly pre-1975 or so, one could find a much greater variety of approaches in the major journals, including articles on the philosophy and history of economics.
The explanation for all this is complex, but surely one important factor is that those who dominate the profession today have built up a vast human capital which they will protect at all costs. They do not want to “confuse” other economists or the public with fundamental challenges to their way of looking at the world. The methodological echo chamber is warm and cozy.
Mario J Rizzo
Professor of Economics,
New York University, New York, NY, US
Arnold Kling insightfully reviews “some problems with technocracy.” Two slices:
Progressives like the notion of public policy being formulated and carried out by experts. Conservatives, and especially libertarians, are skeptical.
Libertarians prefer leaving problems to be solved by individuals and by the market. The results will never be perfect, but we will enjoy our own freedom and agency. And we will not be stuck with a government policy that does more harm than good.
We offer at least three reasons to be skeptical of technocracy: the selection problem, the knowledge problem, and the corruption problem.
…..
Technocratic regulation is not as good in practice as it sounds in theory. Conservatives and libertarians recognize this. Progressives rarely do.
Meanwhile, progressives are happy to criticize the straw man of “free-market fundamentalism,” which they characterize as the view that markets are always perfect. Markets produce flawed outcomes, and a good libertarian or conservative will acknowledge this. But the market process often does a better job of correcting itself than the process of trying to put a government expert in charge of fixing it.
Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge is the rarest of things: a taut, tense thriller packed with rip-roaring action that is also a detailed and believably accurate story about public policy.
Specifically, it’s about civil asset forfeiture and small-town municipal budget corruption.
…..
It’s hard to stress how unusual it is that a movie like this even exists.
What’s even more unusual is that it’s genuinely good as both a policy procedural, tracing the legal mechanisms by which the local police force ruins people’s lives in order to fund an armory full of weaponry, and as a high-stakes action thriller, with nested setups and revenge-film payoffs delivered with surgical precision. There are multiple pump-your-first-and-cheer moments in the movie, thanks partly to Saulnier’s dead-on pacing and geographically coherent action choreography, and partly to [Aaron] Pierre’s should-be-star-making turn as [Terry] Richmond.
Matthew Hennessey reflects on last-week’s “debate” between Harris and Trump. A slice:
I don’t know if Donald Trump is as thin-skinned as he sometimes seems. I do know that falling for the trap Kamala Harris laid for him on crowd size badly undermines his claim to be a master negotiator.
I don’t know if Ms. Harris’s policy evolutions on fracking and private health insurance are sincere. I do know that flip-flopping so boldly and then refusing to discuss it is an insult to voters’ intelligence.
Also reflecting on the Harris-Trump “debate” is Heather Mac Donald. A slice:
Conservatives are right to complain about the blatant bias of ABC’s debate moderators, but the bigger problem was Donald Trump’s undisciplined performance.
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi asks: “Should we blame Fauci for the covid pandemic?” A slice:
The day of Fauci’s testimony, the Harvard- and MIT–affiliated biologist Alina Chan argued in The New York Times that a lab leak at the WIV was the probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Together, the revelations painted a picture of Fauci as a dissembling, denying, power-grabbing bureaucrat who repeatedly used slippery arguments to dodge public oversight of a controversial, high-risk agenda—an agenda that may have led to the very pandemic his job was to prevent.
