David F. Ruccio — Economics—looking backward

The American Economic Association was, in the beginning, a radical organization—founded in 1885, according to Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger, by “Richard Ely, an avowedly Christian Heidelberg-trained professor at Johns Hopkins with a calling to make economics a friend of the working man.” Now, of course, it is anything but radical.

What happened?

Steinbaum and Weisberger’s analysis is that

"University presidents seeking stature for their institutions appealed to rich donors among the period’s Robber Barons, and that appeal was unlikely to be successful when rabble-rousers in the economics department were questioning the foundations of American capitalism, in particular the monopolization and labor exploitation that made the Robber Barons rich in the first place. . ."

When an academic profession is compromised, teaching is compromised and the result is propagandizing.

Economists have been shills ever since. So much for economics as science when you have priors like that. "Science" is just an appeal to argument from authority, an informal fallacy.

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Economics—looking backward
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame