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Marginalized Free-Market Supporters

Several days back, Greg Mankiw asked, Are all economists free-market purists? He highlighted a working paper by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern on the Policy Views of American Economic Association Members. It's an interesting read for many reasons.

People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data is broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Republican). Even the average Republican AEA member is middle-of-the-road, not free-market. We offer several possible explanations of the apparent difference between actual and attributed views.

Only 8% of those in the AEA are supporters of the principles of free markets? Only 3% are strong supporters? 3%?? No wonder free markets get short shrift by non-economists - they aren't even supported by economists. I feel so abandoned.

Mankiw highlighted a particular passage that I found fascinating:

Probably one of the most significant explanations for the erroneous free-market attribution is that almost all scholarly free-market supporters are economists. The center columns of Table 5 [actually Table 6] show that free-market supporters are practically non-existent in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology. There is a familiar heuristic bias of confusing a statement with its inverse. That is, if people perceive that every free market professor is an economist, they may slip into thinking that a preponderance of economists are free-market.

In other words, when the average academic is left-of-center, those in the center appear to him to be on the right. It's all relative to those humanities profs

As usual, Mankiw's comments section has some real gems. To be clear, I am not being facetious when I say that. One example:

Cyril Morong said...

Thanks for posting this. I have wanted to see a survey like this for some time. Sometimes liberals say that the liberals in the humanities and other social sciences are balanced off by the libertarians in the economics departments, so that overall higher education is not biased (this argument was made by someone in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the last couple of years). Maybe the economics departments are not balancing things off.

Now, I'm not one of those conspiracy theorists who believes that America's universities are run by a Marxist cabal who are bent on the ruin of our nation through moral decline and the destruction of meritocracy (pause for Rammage to take the bait), but this is an excellent point. Consider the past work by the authors of this paper. Daniel B. Klein Klein is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Charlotta Stern is a Swedish professor of sociology. You may remember their past studies on how politically skewed academia is... or you may not, but you've probably heard that assertion. Well, how lefty is the academic left, and how right-wing is the academic right? Probably less than you think.

Maybe around 3%.