The behavior of Andrei Shleifer et al in Russia is a scandal that has never been adequately addressed by the Harvard economics department (and the economics profession more generally), and often wished away. This is not a small matter because the Harvard department has been a key source for advisers to government, important textbook writers, consultants to Wall Street, and opinionmakers. (And note that I have not even mentioned Larry Summers, or Martin Feldstein's role at AIG (the link leads you to a cute note on how the Harvard buddy system works), etc).
Of course, they are not alone. That is to say, at the top of the economics discipline there is a considerable rot that suggests that in many way the discipline behaves more like a racket than a science, as one of my favorite right-wingers, Gordon Tullock, argued in The Organization of Inquiry.
And here is the weirdness: philosophers have spent a huge amount of energy exposing psycho-analysis, intelligent design, and Marxism as pseudo-science, yet we remain remarkably reluctant to say anything about our good friends, the economists. (Of course, as we reported here, some of us live in a glass house.)
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