Adam Smith was allegorical, knowingly and profoundly, but after him things went downhill, or even dropped off a cliff. From science anxieties many liberals spurned allegory, touting foundations, facts, science, etc. But we see in their discourse, notably on the economic system as cooperation,...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey. We collected information on the respondents’ membership in twelve professional economic associations. Five are general professional associations (American, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Econometric), and seven are...

In the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually no economist favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some...

In Spring 2003, a large-scale survey of American academics was conducted using academic association membership lists from six fields: Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy (political and legal), Political Science, and Sociology. This paper focuses on one question: To which political party...

Using the records of the seven San Francisco Bay Area counties that surround University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, we conducted a systematic and thorough study of the party registration of the Berkeley and Stanford faculty in 23 academic departments. The departments span...

Adam Smith doubted an invisible hand in academia, saying that academia was prone to clubbish foolishness. From economics-department webpages, I collected data on Ph.D. origination of economics faculty. Using a ranking of 200 economics departments world-wide, I find that at the top departments...

Gunnar Myrdal urged economists to disclose their ideological sensibilities, to mitigate asymmetric-information problems in scientific discourse and to reduce the hazard of bias. Myrdal’s plea informs us of the importance of frank discussion of ideological sensibilities, including...

In figuring eminence in the social sciences, the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) is of great importance. Yet the SSCI selection process is a black box. Scrutiny of the SSCI journal list reveals that the stated SSCI journal selection criteria are vague and applied inconsistently. The Nation,...

This article works from a point of view that holds that there is no market-failure rationale for three primary FDA-administered interventions concerning drugs and medical devices. I critically analyze the culture, rhetoric, and judgment of economists who write on those issues. I take such...

Sociologists of science such as Richard Whitley explain that official institutions may have a profound influence on the character and organization of science. We examine the ties of authors and editorial officers of the Journal of Development Economics (2002) to the World Bank, the IMF, and so...