| >Right wing academics at predominantly state-funded academic institutions have obviously promoted a particular economic worldview for the past century and a half because they want to be made redundant, not because they believe in them? I'm not convinced everybody who doesn't agree with your views on the economy is only in it for the money I didn't say they were only in it for the money, but the marginal utility of a career as an economist is higher if you have "the right views", and, over time, people have a tendency to shape their views around what grants them money and career progression. This is pretty typical. >That says a lot about how effective they are No, it says that that is not part of their agenda. They have never spoken out on it. Only one of the think tanks they fund holds this view. Their core agenda appears to revolve (among other things) around deregulation. At this, they have been very successful. >The front page on their website carries articles about elite financial networks running the world Yeah, elites like trashing one another. Whodathunkit? >Obviously this is all part of the conspiracy to promote mainstream economics and the interests of the rich. I suppose billionaires funding an elaborate game of misdirection over wealth inequality could qualify as that, yes. It's curious that you'd characterize this as the left asserting themselves. >As for Marx, it's lucky that literally no economist has ever written anything complimentary about him Non sequitur? >Obviously state university economics departments are full of professors who would sacrifice their beliefs for fast career progression and high salaries You tend to exit the profession and do something else if your beliefs are too discordant (like my friends did). |
If your particularly hobby horse is writing papers about economic elites ruining the world and mainstream economics being wrong then ample funding opportunities are available even from members of the economic elite, and your book will probably sell more copies too. And you probably don't prize the opportunity for tenure at Chicago that highly unless you actually admire the school's economists anyway.
When the most influential economists of all time are Marx and Keynes, and Stiglitz, Piketty and Krugman get more public attention than most of the rest of the profession put together, it's more than a little difficult to argue that academic economic discourse is highly constrained by the class interests of billionaire rentiers.