Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut And Suresh Naidu — Economists Aren’t As Nonpartisan As We Think

Did "we" think they were nonpartisan. Everyone has assumptions, many of them hidden even from oneself. It's called ideology.

The purpose of scientific method is to reduce subjectivity and increase objectivity. Subjectivity cannot be eliminated so that perfect objectivity is achieved. Cognitive science reveals that reason and feeling are inseparable components of conceptualization based on brain function.

So we set out to test the idea of nonpartisan economics on a large scale. In a recent paper, we researched whether economists’ political leanings were associated with their professional work.3 The answer: yes. 

Our main proxy for research was the text that appeared in academic papers. To identify political leanings, we had to figure out a way to measure the ideology of any economist — not just people like Krugman and Mankiw. Luckily, there’s a growing body of research on how to detect people’s ideology (or mood or personality type) from the way they write….

Five Thirty Eight
Economists Aren’t As Nonpartisan As We Think
Zubin Jelveh, Ph.D. candidate in computer science at New York University’s School of Engineering working on computational social science; Bruce Kogut, professor at the Graduate School of Business and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, and Suresh Naidu, assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Columbia University