[nlew]

When you refuse to acknowledge the value of expertise in a field, you are effectively discrediting the entire field. You really think you know just as much as someone who has studied it for their entire adult life? The only way that can possibly be is if there's nothing to be learned about it.

You may think you understand a topic, but you really have a narrow view of it. You understand your own point of view, but not necessarily others. Or the breadth and depth of consequences to a decision. How can you expect equally valid results through a narrower lens?

[yetanotherphd]

Well it's possible for people to obtain negative learning, e.g. learning things that are false.

I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category.

For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences.

My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pull rank on people who talk about "buying locally" or putting people before profits. But there is no way to consistently enable such rank pulling, since there is a Professor of Marxist Economics somewhere would could accuse me of being ignorant of 100 years of Marxist thought, and give me 1000 books to read before I'm qualified to speak on the topic.

So the only way forward is to reach out to the public and convince them that one's discipline knows the truth.

[WalterBright]

I've seen a Harvard PhD in economics espouse on TV the false cost-push theory of inflation. It made me wonder what is taught in Harvard econ classes.

Further undermining the credibility of econ degrees is an econ professor from my college stating that he believed in the free enterprise system, and the equal distribution of all income. The contradiction didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.

[yetanotherphd]

I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory? The Wikipedia article says that according to Keynsians (and most modern economists are neo-Keynsians who beleive in sticky prices), prices are sticky downwards and so a supply shock to a single good would cause inflation. This seems to be an issue that could be resolved empirically. Are you familiar with the empirical evidence?

On your second point, perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.

[WalterBright]

> I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory?

Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.

> perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.

I quoted his exact words, and he did not qualify them. In particular he did not say "more equal", he said "equal". I remember it to this day because I was astonished.

[yetanotherphd]

>Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.

I couldn't understand that. One difficulty is that not only do Austrian economists use a different language to describe things, but it seems to be arguing against a traditional Keynesian viewpoint. Right now PhD programs don't teach any traditional Keynsian econ, (undergrad programs teach a bit), they skip straight to neo-Keynsianism, which only keeps a few ideas from the original Keynes (e.g. sticky prices). So I don't really understand what the article is arguing against.

I already gave a description of what I thought the sticky-prices based argument for cost-push inflation was. Can you explain in your own words how this particular argument is refuted?

Re the professor, I guess I'll just chalk that up to a bad professor.