by From Michael Bernstein and RWER #84 The transformation of the American political landscape in the wake of Vietnam era had subverted the very foundations of the liberalism that had made sense out of a genuinely public economics. An emphasis on political economic issues that had framed the high tide of activist government since the Great Depression of the 1930s had provided a community of professionals with both the means and the ends to deploy their expertise. As soon as social issues concerning opportunity and equality occupied center stage, most dramatically in the formulation of the 1960s “War on Poverty”, American liberalism ran headlong into the abiding national puzzle of race and ethnicity. A backlash was the inevitable result, one that shifted a dynamic emphasis on productivity
Topics:
Editor considers the following as important: Uncategorized
This could be interesting, too:
John Quiggin writes Trump’s dictatorship is a fait accompli
Peter Radford writes Election: Take Four
Merijn T. Knibbe writes Employment growth in Europe. Stark differences.
Merijn T. Knibbe writes In Greece, gross fixed investment still is at a pre-industrial level.
from Michael Bernstein and RWER #84
The transformation of the American political landscape in the wake of Vietnam era had subverted the very foundations of the liberalism that had made sense out of a genuinely public economics. An emphasis on political economic issues that had framed the high tide of activist government since the Great Depression of the 1930s had provided a community of professionals with both the means and the ends to deploy their expertise. As soon as social issues concerning opportunity and equality occupied center stage, most dramatically in the formulation of the 1960s “War on Poverty”, American liberalism ran headlong into the abiding national puzzle of race and ethnicity. A backlash was the inevitable result, one that shifted a dynamic emphasis on productivity and plenty during the 1950s and 1960s to a static refrain concerning the costs and benefits, the winners and losers in market outcomes during the 1980s and 1990s. So dependent had the promise of liberalism been upon sustained growth as a vehicle of redistributive betterment and justice that the first signs of macroeconomic instability robbed it of its voice and its authority. Indeed, by the last years of the century, “New Deal liberalism” was dead, and with it the hopes and achievements of a public economics.[1]
Perhaps it was predictable, given the rightward turn of American politics in the late twentieth century, that professional economics would itself regress and retrench. A kind of naïveté coupled with an unbridled enthusiasm had propelled the discipline’s leading lights to make claims on its behalf it could not redeem. Once events, and the ideological shifts they provoked, overtook the statecraft economists had so painstakingly fashioned, their flanks were wholly exposed to an unrelenting and unparalleled assault. Reversion to classic principles, a rejection of heterodox notions, an insistence on a professional deportment unable and unwilling to join with the ideological issues in dispute, and a contentment with a return to scholarly detachment were understandable if pathetically timid reactions.
It has been a conviction of those who study the history of the sciences that moribund intellectual traditions may only be overcome by the effective articulation of alternatives. For modern American economics the possibilities for such a restructuring were by the late 1990s, precisely because of the effectiveness of the professionalizing processes that had obtained since the turn of the century, few and far between. A select group at leading colleges and universities continued to wield enormous influence over the distribution of research grants, their own ranks replenished from a hiring process disproportionately focused on the graduates of a small number of highly regarded training programs, including their own. Any examination of publication practices in the field would demonstrate as well that the dissemination of research results remained powerfully concentrated in the hands of an elite few. It is a striking yet hardly surprising finding that, at the height of the economic instability occasioned by the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil price shocks, and the downward trends in productivity enhancement experienced throughout the 1970s, alumni of only seven graduate programs in the discipline authored well over half the scholarly articles published in the nation’s three leading economics journals. Such disciplinary inbreeding was hardly conducive to the elaboration of alternative paradigms.
If, by the 1990s, economics was a social scientific discipline fast retreating from a public role it had sought for decades, it was clearly not the case that the influence of all its practitioners was on the wane.
[1] The historical discussion that follows is drawn, in large measure, from my earlier work on the history of the American economics profession. See, for example, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, ch. 6. read more