> Liza Featherstone & I discovered in researching > our sweatshop economics piece for the late Lingua > Franca that the only Marxist to have gotten a job > at a prestige U.S. economics department in the last > 20 years was John Roemer - and that was a joint > appointment with poli sci, which took the initiative > in recruiting him. > > Doug
Sabri writes:>I bet his ability to practice the religion of mathematics played some role in that.< My experience is that the only Marxian economist that neoclassicals know is Roemer. Sine he has dropped Marx (at least in practice), they know none. >By the way, not only prestigious is a relative concept but also I am against this concept. Well, of course, this does not mean that others have different views. And my issue with my leftist friends is that they let these so-called prestigious departments to be filled with some ignoramuses ...< the economics profession -- like most outside of science -- has a self-selecting hierarchy, which then defines "prestige." The Big Name economists at Big Name departments determine what the Big Name journals are. Those who live up to the standards of the Big Names can become Big Names themselves -- if they show sufficient mathematical virtuosity -- or if they belong to the right "gang." The reason for the last qualification is that the University of Chicago school of economics has especially low standards. A lot of their math isn't virtuous at all. They put up with the pure nonsense of people like a Gary Becker (as opposed to the irrelevant nonsense of a Gerard Debreu). But they form a socio-political bloc of similarly-minded people (advocates of _laissez faire_) who have been through the experience of Chicago grad school, which I understand is a lot like Marine basic training. (A former prof. of mine got drunk and said, in effect: you grad student have it easy; you don't work hard; at Chicago, we had suicides...) Jim Deveine
