Pete Boettke wrote: >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).
There is very little regulation of the research activity that is our focus in this conversation. We can choose to write papers, review them, start journals, etc. with almost no interference from university officials or government regulators. Government funding agencies have even mostly been taken over by academics who run them pretty much the way they would no matter who paid the bills. >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. I suggested that it isn't really a market for truth at all, it is more a market for prestige. To make an analogy, one might complain that the market for TV sitcoms is inefficient because TV shows do not show a realistic slice of life. But if realism isn't what TV consumers want there is no reason to expect TV markets to produce realism. Maybe you see what you think of as "bad" ideas in academia because the consumers of academia really don't care that much if ideas are "bad." >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 ... If the product academic consumers want is *identifiable* smarts, then of course they will prefer kinds of smarts that are more easily identifiable. You sound like someone who likes Japanese food complaining that there are too many Chinese restaurants in your area. Maybe you are really just unhappy with the preferences of the consumers around you. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
