Are Academic Economists Conformists?
Monday July 27, 2009
An interesting piece by Nicholas Wade:
"Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don't have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists."...My wife is an academic and I was planning on being one until I departed into the private sector. First hand, I do believe that as a profession there is more groupthink among academics than most other professions. It is not because there is something nefarious about academia or that academics are bad people (they're not!). Rather the reasons are institutional. In my view there are two institutions at play here:
Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There's a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss's shoes, and to win the group's approval by trashing dissenters.
The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You're an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of "expert" they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you'll bear the less comfortable label of "maverick," which is only a few stops short of "scapegoat" or "pariah."
- The tenure system which consists of two parts - working really hard and convincing others of your competence and then once tenure is achieved life long job security. Both of these, in some fashion, play against 'rocking the boat'. The first factor is straightforward - you do not want to battle against those you need the approval of. The second is less so. It would seem that once you get tenure, you can promote any idea you would like, which should reduce groupthink. However, I believe the people who are attracted by the idea of tenure (and by extension academia in general) are people who highly value stability and job security - the people least interested in 'causing a scene'. I am not suggesting that all academics are like this or even the majority are. However, I would wager that academia has a higher proportion of this personality type than, say, owners of small businesses.
Comments
The peer review process
You are justifying nonsense. They are conformists because they are afraid, once for example somebody is better than them they scream why? especially if that other person is not their race or ethnicity.
Knowledge economics did not even have a unit when I started researching it, I gave it a unit, they said a black should not, that unit was the knowl, how did they imagine they understood anything whhen they where too afraid to give it a unit, because I gave it a unit, I showed them how to measure knowledge you can’t use the market, even showed the correct rate of change formula that I named after myself, “khumalo derivative”, it is just envy that is why they conform then who ever is better they can gang up on as a race. That is the simple fact. They conform to hide their lack of original thought.
Very interesting insight about small business owners not being conformists. They have higher levels of tolerance for ambiguity. There may be more truth to that than I care to admit (being a former small business owner while in undergrad and grad school). Academians are more conformists than they care to admit, especially since Universities are highly structured about how to achieve tenure. You are out if you don’t produce research. Seen it happen to some very promising educators.
Why shouldn’t they confirm and run with the herd? After all its their continued and regular salaries that motivate them and not their ideals. In any case I doubt by now if many of their ideals are left. But those who have managed to escape the bias of their learning instutions and have actually been sufficiently idealistic to be able to still think for themselves, will have made a discovery or two.
1. The present explanations about how macroeconomics works are inadequate.
2. The degree to which the truth is hidden, depends on who is doing the hiding.
For those who are not so inhibitted as to make themselves deliberately blind to how our faltering systm actually functions, they should contact me in order to see for themselves, because I am completing a book which is logical, unbiased, mathematical in part and truthful. Some of what I discover is obvious and some astounding.
David Chester (Macrocompassion) chesterdh@hotmail.com