David Warsh is one of the most informed commentators on contemporary economics. His column is a must-read for anybody interested in the economics profession. (I admit that whenever I have skipped a few, I feel remorse.) Anyway, one of his most recent columns (which supplied me with the title of this entry) discusses the state of two-importantly related issues: the fate of evolutionary economics and the economics' profession's difficulties in coming to terms with technological innovation. In this particular column, one of Warsh' subtle points is that on the issue of technological innovation, Arrow (who as I argued here is crucial to understanding what happened to economics post WWII and whose mathematical skills probably intimidated others) set the discipline on -- to use an expression of George Smith -- a garden path! But the garden path had a cost: as Warsh writes, the "great historians of institutions and technology are dwindling." (One of my favorites among Warsh's list, Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford is also a great Adam Smith scholar, who was extremely generous helping this unknown to him PhD student way back in the 90s.)
Now, Warsh reports that Acemoglu (one of the star MIYT economists of our time) "presented the latest version of diversity as the key to economic progress;" As Warsh remarks: "not really very different from the RAND recommendations of fifty years before."
I wonder if government grant agencies have really internalized this long-term consensus in economics. For, it seems to me obvious that those of us who work in government funded science (that includes philosophy, too, around here), the government prepares to lavish funds on winners (and would be winners) in the name of efficiency. In fact, outside a few private (Anglo) institutions with big endowments, we're fast evolving toward a system where the government (and its representatives) picks a few privileged researchers, while the rest become worker-bees with rather heavy teaching loads (something that is accelerated by the availability of a lot of very good cheap academic labor). If the economists are right, this path is folly.
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