Sorry, Conservatives—Basic Economics Has a Liberal Bias

[n2doc]

By Matthew Yglesias

Chris House has a somewhat odd post in which he argues that unlike in most other academic disciplines, in economics the facts have a conservative bias:

I suspect that the relatively high proportion of conservative views among economics faculty is largely due to contact with the data and with standard economic analysis. In economics it seems like the facts and the analysis have much more of a conservative slant than a liberal one. It really is true that taxing labor income reduces labor supply (a little). It really is true that extending unemployment benefits encourages people to delay looking for a job (a little). It really is true that taxation can reduce employment demand; that excessive business regulation seems to be correlated with reduced levels of business formation; that union concentration has a detrimental effect on industries and on and on. Moreover, the theoretical analysis seems to fit with the observations. Now of course, a liberal’s response to this would normally be “OK, perhaps these effects are there in the data, but the magnitude of the effects is usually pretty small.” That’s often true. It’s certainly true with the minimum wage. At its current level, and I suspect at the proposed new $10.10 level, the effects of the minimum wage on employment will probably be modest.

A couple of odd things pop up here. One is that on House's list of issues where the facts support the conservative position he includes the minimum wage, where the facts as he describes them actually support the Democratic Party's position. Another problem for House's view is that he says he can't think of a single Republican in the economics department he teaches in! Indeed, every survey I've ever seen shows that most economists are Democrats. I think most academic economists end up with an exaggerated view of the conservatism of their fields because they spend a lot of time on college campuses, one of the most left-wing kinds of places you can go in America.

But simply to say that the opinions found in the economics department are more conservative than the views in the sociology department isn't to say that they're conservative relative to existing American politics.

more

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/04/economics_is_liberal_chris_house_on_conservative_economics.html

[Gothmog]

1. Reality has a liberal bias

Facts and reality also have a liberal bias.
Stephen Colbert