Re: FWD: Whither the AEA?

[pdavidso <pdavidso@xxxxxxx>]

>===== Original Message From Ric Holt <rholt@xxxxxxx> =====
>----- Forwarded Message -----
>From: Paul_A <paul_a@xxxxxxx>
.
>
>1) Overall: 	The AEA continues to be ever more monolithic (as hard as that
>is to belive).  Grad students and younger professors especially show signs
>of the near-capture of graduate programs by neo-classics and, as one
>professor put it, an almost boot-camp like training regime.




This is what I have been warning about for years.  The problem is not only the
mainstream. As ther line in Hamlet suggests ... the fault is in ourselves
(heterodox economists) who refuse to unite behind a single alternative  to the
mainstream classical system -- namely Keynes's General Theory based on fewer
axioms than the restrictive axiomatic based classical system.
Instead each heterodox faxtion says -- no the other heterodox systems are not
right -- or at least the "Horses for Courses" approach of Harcourt which
implies for different questions different systems are required.

Such a horses for courses approach allows the mainstream to dismiss all this
heterodox babel since they already have a general equilibrium theory that is
applicable to ALL economic questions!!

Moreover graduate students who might be interested in a non-classical approach
are also turned off by this babel  As one grad student asked me a few years
ago.  He would like too read the hterhodox literature but could not spend his
very scarce time reading all these different heterodox - often logically
incosistent with each other) literature when he had a very limited time to
pass his comps and write a dissertation that had to pass muster with
third-rate mainstream economists who only knew classical general equilibrium
theory and latest econometric tools such as ARCH etc.

When I pointed out to this student that if he followed this approach then in a
few years he would be one of these third rate mainstram economists on a
university faculty forcing students to spend their entire time in mainstream
literature -- he felt embarrassed but felt there was no other course he could
AFFORD to follow -- since the Post Keynesian approach I gave him in class,
while seemingly very good and useful, was not even accepted by others who
called themselves "post Keynesians".

No wonder graduate students and new Ph. D. assistant professors have a
boot-camp mentality.

>The presenters
>(and even the presentations themselves) also seem to have ever tighter
>funding ties to the Federal Govt\Bretton Woods\consulting firm complex -
>without much effort at outside balance.  In some cases, and in an earlier
>time of academia, I believe questions of academic ethics and  intellectual
>objectivity would have been raised by such ties.

In this era of tight university budgets --especially among state universitiesw
-- when Deans and other Central Administrators look to Departments as "profit
centers" where those who obtain outside reaserch funding are more likely to
receive additional funding from the University budget -- it is not surprising
that the pressure is on to do research that meets funding tests of the Federal
Government, NBER , etc.

ITS NOT THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE THAT'S INVOLED ITS THE MONEY.

SO SHOW ME THE MONEY AND THAT'S WHERE THE NEW GRADUATE STUDENTS WILL BE
HEADED!!

In fact I believe that the one major reason for the split in the Notre Dame
Economics Department decreed by the Dean was to obtain a  mainstream economics
department that could attract more outside funding.


Paul Davidson

Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
University of Tennessee
SMC 503
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0550
office phone #;(865)974-3303; office fax#(865)974-4601
home phone and fax # (561)369-1951
email pdavidson@xxxxxxx
http://econ.bus.utk.edu/Davidson.html