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Abstract
In this paper, we examine whether or not there has been a change in economic ideology in the late twentieth century. To conduct the analysis, we first identified the most influential economists, as determined by citation analysis. Next, we divided the database into four decades (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) and ranked the authors according to their citation counts. We examined the articles and classified each of the top 50- and top 10-cited authors, by both definitions, as “free market,” “interventionist,” or “methodological.” We argue that the economics profession has produced more research that draws pro-free-market conclusions over the last four decades of the twentieth century.
Notes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the careful research work of Yanisa Wu, Meghan Entz, Luc Carels, and Katherine Burley.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Posner, “Will Economists Escape a Whipping?”; Rachman, “Sweep Economists Off Their Throne”; Basen, “Economics Has Met the Enemy, and It Is Economics.”
2 Jenkins and Eckert, “The Right Turn in Economic Policy”; Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage”; Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise; Crotty, “Structural Causes of the Global Financial Crisis”; Hudson, “From Deregulation to Crisis”; Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin; Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism; Carrick-Hagenbarth and Epstein, “Dangerous Interconnectedness”; Bilginsoy, A History of Financial Crises; MacLean, Democracy in Chains.
3 Weintraub, “How Should We Write the History of Twentieth-Century Economics?” 143.
4 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom; Dowd, Capitalism and Its Economics.
5 Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin.
6 Burgin, The Great Persuasion.
7 Bernstein, A Perilous Progress, 107.
8 Backhouse, “The Rise of Free Market Economics,” 356.
9 Hunt, History of Economic Thought, 488.
10 Dowd, Capitalism and Its Economics, 197.
11 Bernstein, A Perilous Progress, 173. For other works suggesting a free-market turn, see Solow, “How Did Economics Get That Way, and What Way Did It Get?”; Finlayson, Lyson, Pleasant, Schafft, and Torres, “The ‘Invisible Hand’: Neoclassical Economics and the Ordering of Society; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.
12 Jenkins and Eckert, “The Right Turn in Economic Policy,” 313.
13 Duménil and Levy, “The Crisis of the Early 21st Century.”
14 Harvey, Exhibit A: The Arrogance of the Neoclassical Economists.
15 Dow, Economic Methodology; Backhouse, “The Rise of Free Market Economics”; Varoufakis, Halevi and Theocarakis, Modern Political Economics.
16 Burgin, The Great Persuasion.
17 Guerrien, “Irrelevance and Ideology,” 29; Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin; Chernomas and Hudson, The Profit Doctrine.
18 Backhouse, “The Rise of Free Market Economics,” 375.
19 Chernomas and Hudson, The Profit Doctrine. For an interesting book about the dominance of free-market ideas in economics, see Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, although he would reject the term free market, which he argues downplays the crucial role of government in what he terms neoliberalism. Mirowski also provides suggestive evidence of the continued prominence of neoliberal thought in economics after the 2008 economic crisis.
20 Kosnik, “What Have Economists Been Doing for the Last 50 years?”
21 Kelly and Bruestle, “Trend of Subjects Published in Economics Journals 1969–2007.”
22 Claveau and Gingras, “Macrodynamics of Economics.”
23 Kim, Morse, and Zingales, “What Has Mattered to Economics since 1970”; Hamermesh, “Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing.”
24 Önder and Terviö, “Is Economics a House Divided?”
25 The Economist, “Shifting Clout” attempted to capture economists’ influence outside the academy by tracking “how much attention was paid to their utterances in the mainstream media, the blogosphere and in social media over a 90-day period up to December 11th, 2014.” The magazine’s rankings were dominated by central bankers rather than economists working in universities.
26 Kapeller, “Citation Metrics: Serious Drawbacks, Perverse Incentives and Strategic Options for Heterodox Economics.”
27 Bornmann and Daniel, “What Do Citation Counts Measure?” 49.
28 For an application of this idea to economics that concludes “All that existing ranking systems reveal is the mainstream’s view of itself,” see Beed and Beed, “Measuring the Quality of Academic Journals: The Case of Economics.” See also Lee, “Research Assessment Exercise, the State, and the Dominance of Mainstream Economics in British Universities.”
29 Gingras, Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation.
30 Cronin, “Norms and Functions in Citation”; Bornmann and Daniel, “What Do Citation Counts Measure?”
31 Lawani, “Some Bibliometric Correlates of Quality in Scientific Research.”
32 Bornmann and Daniel, “What Do Citation Counts Measure?” 54.
33 Lederberg, “Reply to H. V. Wyant”; Garfield, “The Obliteration Phenomenon in Science and the Advantage of Being Obliterated.”
34 Van Raan, “Fatal Attraction,” 134–35. A survey of the literature on citations arrives at similar conclusions: Bornmann and Daniel, “What Do Citation Counts Measure?”
35 Beed and Beed, “Measuring the Quality of Academic Journals,” 396.
36 Laband and Piette, “The Relative Impacts of Economics Journals”; Vieira, “Statistical Variability of Top Ranking Economics Journals Impact.”
37 Liebowitz and Palmer, “Assessing the Relative Impacts of Economic Journals.”
38 Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos, “Rankings of Academic Journals and Institutions in Economics.”
39 Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos, “Rankings of Academic Journals and Institutions in Economics.”
40 Durden and Ellis, “A Method for Identifying the Most Influential Articles in an Academic Discipline.”
41 Durden and Ellis, “A Method for Identifying the Most Influential Articles in an Academic Discipline,” 4.
42 Claveau and Gingras, “Macrodynamics of Economics.”
43 More precisely, the ideology of the authors in terms of the works that they have published. It is not the personal ideology that we are interested in but the conclusions of the articles cited here.
44 Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation.”
45 Baumol, “Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth.”
46 Chow, “Tests of Equality Between Sets of Coefficients in Two Linear Regressions.”
47 Milgrom and Roberts, “Price and Advertising Signals of Product Quality.”
48 Kreps et al., “Rational Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoners' Dilemma”; Kreps and Wilson, “Reputation and Imperfect Information.”
49 Brown and Warner, “Measuring Security Price Performance.”
50 Griliches, “Distributed Lags.”
51 Griliches, “Research Costs and Social Returns.”
52 Lind, “How Reaganism Actually Started with Carter.”
53 Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 383.
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Notes on contributors
Anupam Das
Anupam Das teaches in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Ian Hudson
Ian Hudson teaches in the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Mark Hudson
Mark Hudson teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.