Divided We Stand? Professional Consensus and Political Conflict in Academic Economics

Beyer, Karl M.; Pühringer, Stephan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3425768

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…When past evidence is less extensive, differences in opinions do show up." 8 They also find that "there is no evidence to support a conservative versus liberal divide among these panel members, at least on the types of questions included so far in the surveys." 9 Van Gunten et al (2016) suggest that Gordon's and Dahl's focus on testing factionalism, which reduces the social structure of the discipline to discrete and mutually exclusive group memberships, is a poor model for economics.…”

Section: Economics and Ideology: A Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 96%

Who Said or What Said? Estimating Ideological Bias in Views Among Economists

Javdani¹,

Chang²

2019

SSRN Journal

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Section: Economics and Ideology: A Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 96%

Who Said or What Said? Estimating Ideological Bias in Views Among Economists

Javdani¹,

Chang²

2019

SSRN Journal

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“…Finally, there is compelling evidence that economists make policy assessments and give policy advice in accordance with their own ideological positions. When the profession is rather uniform in its worldviews, perspectives, and understandings of poverty, this means that policy advice and public engagement are likely one-sided and biased (Horowitz and Hughes, 2018;Beyer and Pühringer, 2019). In particular, a recent study by Banuri et al (2019) brought to light cognitive biases of development professionals (see also World Bank, 2015).…”

Section: Epistemic Injustices and Research Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

Flechtner

2021

Review of Income and Wealth

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Edited volumes have low prestige in economics. Fortunately, the anthology Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism, compiled by Valentin Beck, Henning Hahn, and Robert Lepenies (2020), proves that edited volumes can be more than a loose collection of chapters unworthy of becoming journal articles. The editors have produced an important collection of 20 chapters around the conceptualization, understanding, and measurement of poverty, which brings together debates from economics, philosophy, political science, public policy, and sociology. The outcome is more than simply the sum of its parts: there is something to be learned both from individual chapters and, specially, from their cross-fertilization.The volume is concerned with the conceptualization and measurement of poverty. Yet, this topic is placed within the context of two other important and timely debates (see Figure 1). First, the volume establishes a link between the quality of poverty research and the perspectives that feed into it. A central theme here is epistemic injustice following Fricker (2007): it is argued that Global South perspectives are often undervalued or outright ignored. This is at the detriment of research quality because, in the view proposed, poverty research must carefully consider particular societal contexts. Hence the inclusion of scholars from diverse backgrounds and with society-specific knowledge "is not only a question of fairness (…) but also highly instructive" (Beck et al., 2020, p. 11). Various contributions also emphasize the importance of the views of those who live in poverty themselves, as well as of those who work in policy-making and poverty reduction outside academia. Second, the volume discusses how the way in which academics conceptualize, define, understand, and measure poverty has important implications for the actual lives of people living in poverty. In the words of one contributor, "[c]onceptual issues are not merely abstract and fringe discussions; they have an impact and influence on how reality is perceived, how it is shaped and how it should be changed. Concepts drive actions" (Schweiger, 2020, p. 163).On the topic of poverty, the anthology brings good and bad news. The bad news first: there will never be a definitive answer to the question of how to conceptualize or measure poverty, and we will never be done researching poverty. There are too many dimensions to poverty, too many normative judgments to be

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“…However, as recent studies on the public policy views of prominent economists showed that the support for trade liberalisation to increase potential economic welfare is a rather consensus position among economists (e.g Gordon andDahl 2013, Beyer andPuehringer 2019). Hence only about 5 per cent of the respondents of a survey among economists disagreed with the statement that 'tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general welfare' (Fuller and Geide-Stevenson 2014, p. 134).…”

Section: On Trade Debate(s) In the Economics Professionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Trade (Policy) Discourse in Top Economics Journals

Aistleitner

Pühringer

2020

New Political Economy

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In the aftermath of recent populist upheavals in Europe, nationalist economic policies challenge the overly positive view on economic integration and the reduction of trade barriers established by standard economic theory. For quite a long time the great majority of economists supported trade liberalisation policies, at least those actively engaged in policy advice or public debates. In this paper, we examine the elite economics discourse on trade policies during the last 20 years regarding specific characteristics of authors, affiliations, citation patterns, the overall attitude towards trade, as well as the methodological approach applied in these papers. Our analysis yields the following results: First, the hierarchical structure of economics also manifests in the debate about trade. Second, while we found some indications of a shift towards more empirically oriented work, quite often empirical data is solely used to calibrate models rather than to challenge potentially biased theoretical assumptions. Third, top economic discourses on trade are predominantly characterised by a normative bias in favour of tradeliberalisation-policies. Forth, we found that other-than-economic impacts and implications of trade policies (political, social and cultural as well as environmental issues) to a great extent either remain unmentioned or are rationalised by means of pure economic criteria. KEYWORDS Trade evaluation; trade policies; 'empirical turn'; social studies of economics; bibliometric analysis; top economic journals JEL CODES A12; A14; B41; F10 It has long been an unspoken rule of public engagement for economists that they should champion trade and not dwell too much on the fine print. (Rodrik 2018

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Divided We Stand? Professional Consensus and Political Conflict in Academic Economics

Cited by 9 publications

References 57 publications

Who Said or What Said? Estimating Ideological Bias in Views Among Economists

Who Said or What Said? Estimating Ideological Bias in Views Among Economists

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

The Trade (Policy) Discourse in Top Economics Journals

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