Biography of an Economist

What kind of person becomes an economist? If, like many, you see professional economists as pro-market fanatics, you will assume an origin story along the following lines:

1. You grow up in a well-off, center-right or right-wing home.

2. As a teen-ager, you grow curious about the best way to rationalize your center-right or right-wing convictions. You’re like Alex Keaton from Family Ties, except you’re in ideological harmony with your parents.

3. Inspired by tales of Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and other free-market economists, you go to college and become an economics major. Your professors cement your ideological prejudices, and gradually induct you into their free-market cult.

4. Since you’re near the top of your classes and you fit in, you go to grad school to get a Ph.D. You toil with a pile of math and stats for most of the rest of your twenties.

5. Voila, you become a professional economist - and start leading other youths of similar background to follow in your pro-market footsteps.

In reality, though, no more than 5% of economists have such an origin story. How do I know? Although I teach econ at heterodox George Mason University, I went to standard elite colleges: UC Berkeley for undergrad, Princeton for grad school. I talked to a lot of classmates at both schools, and have met many hundreds of other professional economists. I therefore confidently insist that the typical economist’s origin story actually goes like so:

1. You grow up in a well-off, center-left or left-wing home.

2. As a teen-ager, you became a vocal left-wing intellectual, confident that your side has all the answers.

3. Following the path of least resistance, you go to college. Despite left-wing misgivings, you take Econ 1 and discover some troubling downsides of standard left-wing policies. You hear about scarcity and opportunity costs. You learn about the equity-efficiency trade-off. You find out that incentives matter. You see why price controls lead to shortages and surpluses.

4. While you absorb the reality of these downsides reluctantly, you eagerly embrace every textbook story about market failure. Monopoly, externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, behavioral econ: All “scientifically” confirm your left-wing priors. Still, the net effect of economics is to tone down your youthful leftist enthusiasm - to realize that “the world is more complex” than you thought. Left moves to center-left, center-left moves to moderate.

5. Since you’re near the top of your classes and you fit in, you go to grad school to get a Ph.D. You toil with a pile of math and stats for most of the rest of your twenties.

6. Voila, you become a professional economist - and start helping other youths of similar background to follow in your center-left “the world is more complex than I thought” footsteps.

In my view, a truly high-quality undergraduate economics program would turn even a far-left freshman into an avid Friedmanite - and push everyone else to more extreme libertarian stances. Regardless of whether I’m right, however, nothing of the kind goes on in most actually-existing undergraduate economics programs.

The chief function of actually-existing undergraduate econ, rather, is taking know-it-all leftist teen-agers and showing them some trade-offs. Kind of like that scene with the eyedrops in A Clockwork Orange. This intellectual experience has near-zero influence on students’ core values, which remain conventionally left-wing. In their hearts, most professional economists continue to place equity over efficiency, distribution over production, and social cohesion over economic growth, just as they did in their teens. Still, economic education convinces them that (a) there is a trade-off, and (b) this trade-off is occasionally severe enough to justify deliberate sacrifices of equity, distribution, and social cohesion.

This might not seem like much, but in a world ruled by Social Desirability Bias, what’s amazing is not that most economists continue to affirm feel-good platitudes. What’s amazing is that most economists occasionally play the iconoclast. To quote Freud:

The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.

Every now and then, I hear a center-left economist publicly express dismay at the left-wing activists’ view that economics is “somehow right-wing.” But in this instance, the economists are wrong and the activists are right. Why? Because the activists are stuck at the teen-age know-it-all stage of intellectual development. To say they don’t know-it-all is equivalent to calling them wrong.