Sad academic envy
IN the course of some mostly reasonable comments about the Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, Brad DeLong slips this in:
The MFI will produce not good intellectual work but instead propaganda for a powerful and exploitative interest group–think of the Heritage Foundation, or Stanford’s Hoover Institution. This is my objection to the MFI.
This does not quite mean what it says, because DeLong means that the Milton Friedman Institute could end up that way, but expects that the University of Chicago will not go this route. My observation is more about his smear of the Hoover Institution.
Two observations. First, DeLong sugguests that Hoover does not produce “good intellectual work”. A list of the Hoover fellows is here. I count about forty who are, like DeLong, economists. There are 60 economists in DeLong’s economics department at UC-Berkeley. How do they stack up? You won’t get me trashing the economics department at Berkeley. Although a lot are people I don’t know, because their fields are well outside mine, the ones whose work I know are excellent. George Akerlof got a Nobel prize, and David Card and Matthew Rabin are Clark medalists, which has a professional prestige not much different from the Nobel. What about Hoover, which is only two thirds the size. It manages three Nobel prizes (A. Michael Spence, Douglass North, and Gary Becker), and three Clark medalists (Kevin Murphy, Spence, and Becker). Ooh, that must hurt.
Second, DeLong accuses Hoover of producing “propaganda for a powerful and exploitative interest group”. He would perhaps be thinking here of the work of Hoover fellow Robert Conquest wrote exposing Stalin, for which the left excoriated him years. Or maybe he is pissed because DeLong says he fervently believes in affirmative action for blacks, and Hoover does not have them? Not likely, since just among the economists at Hoover, Thomas Sowell and Carolyn Hoxby are black, whereas DeLong is happily ensconsed in a department devoid of any descendants of slaves.
Me, I think DeLong is pissed off that he hasn’t gotten any free lunches at Hoover lately.