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

Javdani, Moshen; Chang, Ha‐Joon

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3483976

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(90 reference statements)

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“…Although the distinction may have been more prominent in past decades (Mankiw, 2006), recent evidence suggests that this freshwater/saltwater divide continues to structure hiring and citation patterns within elite economics departments (Onder & Tervio, 2015; Terviö, 2011). Moreover, recent research identifies signs of a persistent division between free market and interventionist tendencies using large scale text analysis of economics articles (Diaf et al., 2022; Jelveh et al., 2018), in networks of policy petition signatories (Beyer & Pühringer, 2019) and survey experiments with academic economists (Javdani & Chang, 2019). Recent research also shows that, despite the high level of consensus found in the IGM panel, there is also a significant degree of ideological alignment, or stratification across a latent free market/interventionism axis (Van Gunten et al., 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are economists overconfident? Ideology and uncertainty in expert opinion

Kozlowski

Gunten

2023

British Journal of Sociology

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Economics frequently serves as an advisory discipline to policymakers, bolstered in part by its claims to a unified intellectual framework and high disciplinary consensus. Recent research challenges this perspective, providing empirical evidence that economists' professional opinions are divided by ideological commitments to either free markets on one hand or state intervention on the other. We investigate the influence of ideology in economics by examining the relation between economists' ideological commitments and the certainty with which they express their expert opinions. To examine this relationship, we analyze data from the Initiative on Global Markets Economic Experts Panel, a unique survey of 51 economists at seven elite American universities. Our results suggest that economists with ideologically patterned views report higher levels of certainty in their opinions than their less ideologically consistent peers, but this boost in confidence is limited to topics that closely pertain to the free market versus interventionism divide.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are economists overconfident? Ideology and uncertainty in expert opinion

Kozlowski

Gunten

2023

British Journal of Sociology

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“…People exhibit a range of cognitive biases when evaluating and judging situations in various contexts (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, 1982;Klayman, 1995;Nickerson, 1998;Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman, 2002). While laypeople and economists may have systematic disagreements in assessing the state of the economy or different economic policies (Caplan, 2002;Caplan and Miller, 2010), economists themselves are not immune to biases in their judgments (Javdani and Chang, 2023). However, discussions on biases have recently received even more attention in the context of the accelerated development of artificial intelligences (AIs) than solely in the realm of human behavior, given the disruptive potential that large language models, such as ChatGPT, can have in various spheres of life (Ferrara, 2023;Ray, 2023;Singh and Ramakrishnan, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ortho-Heterodox Biases and the Economist Algorithms of ChatGPT

Iazdi

2023

IJHE

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Recommendations for economic policies can be based on different theoretical perspectives and may present hidden biases. Identifying these biases is challenging when they are embedded in recommendations from sources with high technological and social disruptive potential, where a good level of impartiality is expected, such as contemporary large language models. Thus, a questionnaire was administered to economists affiliated with the Brazilian academic community to assess their perception of orthodox/heterodox biases in economic policy recommendations derived from interactions with ChatGPT. The results showed that: i) there is still no consensus on the concepts of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Brazil; ii) there are indications of a positive relationship between how self-proclaimed heterodox (orthodox) an economist is and how heterodox (orthodox) the perceived bias in an economic policy is; iii) it was not possible to identify a consistently orthodox or heterodox bias in ChatGPT's recommendations, which exhibited a good degree of impartiality.

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The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg’s ordoliberalism

Dold

Krieger

2021

Public Choice

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In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, a battle of ideas emerged over whether ordoliberalism is part of the cause or the solution of economic problems in Europe. While German ordoliberals argued that their policy proposals were largely ignored before, during and after the crisis, critics saw too much ordoliberal influence, especially in form of austerity policies. We argue that neither view is entirely correct. Instead, we observe that the battle of ideas is largely independent of the countries’ actual responses to the Eurozone crisis: pragmatic self-interest on behalf of governments rather than their ideological convictions played a crucial role in political reactions. We explain this dynamic game-theoretically and highlight a number of reasons for the decoupling of the political-pragmatic debate from the ideological-academic discourse. In addition, we argue that ordoliberals themselves contributed to the ideological misuse of their own program: the ordoliberal Freiburg School ceased to be an active research program and instead grew to resemble a tradition which all too often disregarded the international academic discourse, in particular in macroeconomics. As a result, ordoliberal thinking was abused by its proponents and critics alike to emphasize their preconceived Weltanschauung (worldview). We end our paper with some thoughts on how a contemporary ordoliberalism can be constructively used to react to some of the challenges of the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

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

Cited by 5 publications

References 39 publications

Are economists overconfident? Ideology and uncertainty in expert opinion

Are economists overconfident? Ideology and uncertainty in expert opinion

Ortho-Heterodox Biases and the Economist Algorithms of ChatGPT

The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg’s ordoliberalism

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