[Pen-l] Ideological Discrimination in Economics?

[michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sometime ago I remember reading a study that indicated the way that 
publications from Chicago trained economists clustered in the Journal of 
Political Economy and those from Harvard, in the Quarterly Journal of 
Economics. (Maybe someone recalls the reference.)

I recently came upon an article about the respective hiring patterns of 
departments of economics, comparative literature, of mathematics.  A 
similar type of clustering occurs in economics, but far more modestly in 
mathematics, where presumably ideology would not play much of a role.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1347002

Economists commonly describe the ideological clustering is a division 
between freshwater and saltwater economists -- because the conservative 
departments tend to be in the interior and the more liberal along the 
East and West coasts.

The author does not attribute the clustering to ideological influences, 
but one might suspect a reluctance of Chicago to dilute its ideological 
purity with an excessive influx of people who do Harvard or MIT style 
economics.  Admittedly, the difference between these schools is much 
more modest than it has been in the past.

If one can accept the possibility of mutual discrimination on account of 
relatively modest intellectual differences, might one be forgiven for 
suspecting the long-denied discrimination against radical economists?


--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929

530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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