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PeonForHer -> RE: Professors and their politics (12/7/2012 4:58:15 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Edwynn
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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
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ORIGINAL: Edwynn
You go by what the purely politically motivated media tell to get all your info on economics. Congratulations.
No, I go by what I learned about economics - political economy, particularly - during my studies of political science.
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Ah, that would explain the ignorance, not to mention the inherent ideological imbalance, then.
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Besides, you don't need a politically motivated media - economists are generally quite politically motivated themselves.
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And political science isn't, then. Right.
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As demonstrated in my earlier post, economists at the university (not 'political economists') are noticeably less overtly political than most others. Further, I would extend that to the economists working in the private sector, the public sector, and the local, national, and international NGOs who hire them.
Labour advocates, poverty reduction advocates, non-invasive economic development advocates, green advocates, sustainable agriculture advocates, etc. rely on economists to be able to present anything actually meaningful to the process. Lawyers are ultimately necessary to these processes, too, in order to actually effect change within our system. Political ideology is what keeps things in the nightmarish quagmire that we find ourselves in.
The great harm done to third 'third world' or developing economies' agriculture done by the industrial farm subsidies of North America and Europe would never have come to the attention of anybody were it not for economists being able identify the problem in the first place and to show the mechanism of that most pernicious process.
Edwynn,
Hell's bells have you got the wrong end of the stick.
For a start, 'overtly political' isn't the problem. The problem is a political bias that goes unrecognised; one that seeps into one's thinking about economics. That's happened in all of the sciences, throughout all of the history that I know about. Any university library that teaches the social sciences will have a vast literature on this. It would be ludicrous to assume that economists have made themselves immune from this.
Political science is *of course* politically motivated as well, as I've said before. The key thing is to become conscious of one's politically-biased assumptions. Many economists have *of course* become aware of the political bias lying under the damage that has been done in the developing world by what has been treated as 'the normal and unavoidable processes of economics'.
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Progress requires coherence and at least some token semblance of logic contained within an idea itself, which is anathema to any political ideology I am aware of.
It's almost impossible to know where to start with this because it's so misconceived. I shall stick to just one thing:
Perhaps I should point out that you're using 'ideology' as though the word applies only to those political wordviews that people consciously recognise as such. This is nonsense. It destroys the power of the term as a means of understanding. It enables X to say, 'Y has ideology because he's a Marxist. I'm not a Marxist - in fact, I don't buy any 'isms' at all - I have no ideology'.
But the great irony is that X is driven more by ideology because he doesn't recognise that he is. Instead, X believes, his own outlook is just formed by 'ordinary, balanced reason' ('Objectivism', the social theorist Jurgen Habermas calls this). *Therein* lie some of the biggest and most intractable problems about the ways humans organise (or *dis* - organise) the way they live.
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