Robin, I am shocked that you would claim that academics is an unregulated industry ... shocked.
If I told that there was an organization that had the following characteristics what you say: 1. The owners do not manage the system 2. The workers make most of the managerial decisions 3. Consumer do not pay the full cost of the service Well, welcome to the modern public university. Outside of the role of public universities, there is also state funding of most private universities (at the research level). To be clear --- I am not whinning about the place of Austrians in the world of ideas --- some of it is because of "inefficiencies" other explanations are due to the incompentence of the leading exponents of the Austrian school. I am simply making a claim about the disciplinary devices within one set of institutional setting and another. Academic institutions, I claim (an empirical claim), do not penalize bad ideas as effectively as say a market economy would. At best it is a metaphor to say that the academic disciplines operate within a "market for ideas". And the metaphor is only partially correct. On the smarts issue --- I actually think we should value judgment and wisdom more than smarts, though smarts is easy to identify and judgement and wisdom are often only recongize ex post (in other words, cannot be recognized at the time it would need to be recognized for reward mechanisms to work). Prof. Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 Phone: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HomePage: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke Editor, THE REVIEW OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS
