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[mack4289]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/11/business/economics.php

[i]"For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.

But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the United States, and practiced in Washington. They are questioning the profession's most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.

"There is much too much ideology," said Alan Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is "often a triumph of theory over fact."

Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad.

Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

"What I've learned is anyone who says anything even obliquely that sounds hostile to free trade is treated as an apostate," Blinder said.

And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets - like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices - are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.

That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates.

"You lose your ticket as a certified economist if you don't say any kind of price regulation is bad and free trade is good," said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done groundbreaking research on the effect of the minimum wage.

Most economists are still devoted to what is known as the neoclassical model. Philip Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago - the temple of free-market economics - said the theory and methods were "taught to avoid personal biases and conclusions that aren't found in the data."

Like any science, he said, the field changes course slowly: "It requires evidence, and if evidence is there, it will accumulate and positions will move." He added, "I personally have a lot of faith in the discipline."

... According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America's 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).

Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure.

There are a few university departments where these iconoclasts are welcome, like Amherst in Massachusetts, the New School in New York and Lee's home base, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but these are exceptions."

Sounds pretty rough for those free market skeptics. But why isn't one instance of censorship or biased hiring practices named specifically? Where are the neoclassical economists who consider the free market skeptics to be "crazy", "deluded" or "apostates"? The only one who speaks for neoclassical economics is just asking for evidence before he changes his position.

Seems like the NYT fell for the "no one's taking my ideas seriously so my ideas must make people angry" angle. Pretty lazy journalism.