Kimball Corson — On Being Highly Resistive to Indoctrination

One of my basic observations, having been in the economics PhD program and in the law school there, is those at and from the University of Chicago usually have much too strong a tendency to implicitly assume that anything government does is bad and work their analysis up from there to favor free market results.

Probability alone should otherwise imply a greater spread to Chicagoans' research results and conclusions. The bias is clear and discernible, leaking through particularly in regard to assumptions made, matters taken as given and topics selected for study or comment.

The implicit or explicit view of much Chicagoan analysis is no matter what it does or how it does it, government always gets it wrong and markets -- even when they crash and burn right under our noses -- always get it right. All crashing and burning is also government's fault. Government is always slandered and markets apologetics are more pervasive and strained than those of Catholic theologians, at least with non-Chicagoans.

MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia are more diversified and empirical in their views with fewer axes to be monolithically ground. The thing about the bias is it is quite predictable. Honest open ended research seldom is.

Wandering the Oceans
On Being Highly Resistive to Indoctrination
Kimball Corson