Nothing bad. I was trying to provoke DeLong, which turns out to be difficult, by implying Taylor was an example of an economist with unimpeachable analytical credentials who is not ensconced in a mainstream, hot-shit department. I was not, incidentally, suggesting that the New School was any sort of come-down in terms of actual merit. If the profession was a true meritocracy and not bound by ideology, we wouldn't have little clusters of intellectual non-conformists, or good researchers/writers stuck in teaching departments. They would all be slotted according to neutral criteria of scholarship. As most here would agree, they aren't.
> . . .
> Ask yourself, why can't econ Ph.D.s get jobs? Basically,
> "market" for econ
> majors/students is "signaling" a profound excess supply. I'd
> like to believe
> that this "rationalization" of the workforce is due to its own
> intellectual
> bankruptcy - but I doubt it.
Actually I've seen reports in the mainstream press about the fall in demand for business economists for precisely this reason: business firms found them expendable. Another form of this came out in firms utilizing macro forecasting, to the effect that the newer people coming out of blue-chip departments weren't very useful because they couldn't do actual modelling, or because most macro modelling in the business world remains Keynesian. I even caught the Heritage FOundation using a Keynesian model to support one of their dubious propositions.
Otherwise I'd attribute a fall in demand to the mismatch between what colleges decide to promote and what the economy needs, which has something to do with intellectual bankruptcy but not too much.
The fundamental dynamic in elite academia is a self- perpetuating hierarchy. Professors promote those who would uphold the immortality of their theories and values. And not just 'bourgeois' professors. The excess output of those who never make it into the elite circles is merely a prop for the resources allocated to the departments.
MBS