While the Republicans are clearly enjoying the benefits of the “hack gap”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/08/hack_gap.html, “Christopher Shea”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/24/resting_on_their_laureates/ suggests in the _Boston Globe_ that the Democrats’ ‘professoriate gap’ doesn’t count for much. According to Shea, (1) the recent poll of academic economists in the _Economist_ where 70% of economists judged Bush’s fiscal policy to be bad, or very bad, (2) the letter signed by Harvard Business School professors suggesting that Bush flunked his tax policy, and (3) the letter from over 700 foreign policy scholars denouncing the Iraq adventure are so much hot air.
Shea’s article is lazy, one-sided, and intellectually sloppy. It tries to squash two, quite different arguments into an incoherent whole. The first is undeniably true – that academics don’t have much power to influence elections. The second is false – that this means that polls or petitions signed by academics are politically irrelevant. Academic economists and international relations scholars have real expertise in their areas of interest – that’s why they’re frequently tapped by both Democratic and Republican administrations for middle-to-senior policy positions. They’re not just living in ivory towers. Furthermore, both economics and international relations departments are ideologically and intellectually diverse – it’s notoriously hard to get them to agree on anything. When international relations scholars from both left and right unite to denounce a major foreign policy initiative, it’s a pretty good signal that there’s something horribly wrong with the policy in question. Likewise, when the great majority of economists are convinced that Bush’s fiscal policy is bad-to-disastrous, it tells us something important about how truly awful Bush’s fiscal policy is.
Update: Chris Shea responds, defending the article in comments.
{ 10 comments }
Giles 10.26.04 at 9:09 pm
“academics don’t have much power to influence elections” implies that “polls or petitions signed by academics are politically irrelevant” in determining the outcome of an election nay? Or how else could their opinions be relevant”?
Academics are “tapped by both Democratic and Republican administrations for middle-to-senior policy positions” implies that if you have a Republican admin, the residue is probably a biased sample?
Matt Weiner 10.26.04 at 9:18 pm
Henry, I think your second paragraph misreads the article. Those two arguments are conflated only by Elliott Cohen in the last two paragraphs.
Christopher Shea’s own argument seems to be, “Some academics support Kerry, but I can find some who support Bush (look! Milton Friedman! This year’s Nobel Prizewinner, who also thinks that it’s easy to make $200K a year! Some guy who thinks tax increases are “semi-socialist”!) And an AEI employee says that professors are all politically correct eggheads. So, duh….”
So, lazy and intellectually sloppy, yes; important news from this unlikely consensus, yes; but I don’t think Shea even manages to put two arguments together into an incoherent whole.
Redshift 10.26.04 at 10:34 pm
Academics are “tapped by both Democratic and Republican administrations for middle-to-senior policy positions†implies that if you have a Republican admin, the residue is probably a biased sample?
As someone who has lived in the Washington area for most of my life, I think it’s extremely doubtful that the number of academics who receive political appointments is large enough to produce a significant shift in the collective opinion of the remainder.
(There are quite a few economists and foreign relations experts who are employed by the government, certainly, but a large majority are career employees, and do not come and go with different administrations.)
Giles 10.26.04 at 11:20 pm
True, but if there is some degree of hysteris, then the fact that 16 out of the last 24 years have seen Republican administrations might explain some sorting whereby republican are less likely to be employed in academia?
Giles 10.26.04 at 11:21 pm
True, but if there is some degree of hysteris, then the fact that 16 out of the last 24 years have seen Republican administrations might explain some sorting whereby republican are less likely to be employed in academia?
P O'Neill 10.27.04 at 12:33 am
>>
it’s a pretty good signal that there’s something horribly wrong with the policy in question. Likewise, when the great majority of economists are convinced that Bush’s fiscal policy is bad-to-disastrous, it tells us something
>>
Signal…TO WHOM?
“tells us” …WHO IS US?
Surely the point is that the average voter is drawing no conclusion even when there’s an academic consensus that a policy is problematic. Even in 2000, non-hack academics could see problems with Bush’s policy proposals. Any evidence it hurt him?
Chris Shea 10.27.04 at 1:03 am
Okay, I made a mistake by landing so heavily at the end on the quotes from Cohen and Muravchik; that suggested that I was siding with their views. And I had to do it over I’d give more space to the foreign-policy petition.
But in a short piece summarizing some of the academic endorsements floating around–in which almost all the examples are pro-Kerry–should I really have simply omitted the pro-Bush side, because that side is (supposedly) only made up of predictable hacks?
For good or bad–very bad, Matt Weiner thinks–I wasn’t trying to mount an argument in that column, just trying to give a sense of where people were lining up. To have suggested that all “experts” are pro-Kerry would have been disingenuous, it seems to me.
Henry 10.27.04 at 2:21 am
As noted above, the article read like a one-sided slam – the problem I had wasn’t that it gave some room to anti-Kerry experts as that it gave the strong impression that the experts’ opinions were irrelevant by closing as it did with the Cohen and Muravchik quotes (Cohen, by the way, is almost certainly wrong when he implies that Bush could gather together a substantial group of foreign policy academics to defend his approach). That said, I’m happy to accept your contention that you didn’t deliberately intend the article to read that way.
Hollie 10.27.04 at 2:53 pm
Any group (including academics) that wants to influece an election can do so. It only requires money, as the Swift Boat group, among others, have demonstrated. When academics show that they expect to be influential simply by opening their mouths, people see them as elitist and irrelevant.
Matt Weiner 10.27.04 at 5:42 pm
I should say that, though I think it is bad that Shea’s article strives for balance, I don’t think it’s especially his fault. What’s going on is endemic in American journalism: an objectivity fetish, in which one tries to report two sides of a story without mentioning that one side is either wrong on the facts or more predictably hackish than another. That’s not unique to Shea in the slightest–I should probably have made that clear in the original post. (And I don’t have any particular solution and wouldn’t want Shea’s job, so I probably should just have kept my gob shut.)
And I agree with Henry about the ending–it looked one-sided, but I can see how that wouldn’t have been deliberate.
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