Like the Fed with the 1980 election, non-partisan semi-governmental groups prefer to not make themselves to blame for election outcomes and risk inane increases to oversight by legislators.
How can such a thing possibly be non-partisan? The people running surely vote in the elections and thus care about the outcome, I don't see how they couldn't be partisan when their statements can have huge effects on the outcome.
Non-partisan usually means people aren't directly influenced by political leadership. Pelosi has no recourse if NBER doesn't make the decision that she wants, whereas, she can punish/reward the junior Congresspeople in her party by withholding seats or funding for election campaigns. Thus, NBER is non-partisan while Democratic Congresspeople are partisan.
I would hope that every member of NBER votes. It's their civic duty.
In that case why wouldn't they try to influence the election? It depends on what kind of people sit there, but most academics favor democrats. So I don't see how that statement gives us a good reason to believe that they aren't taking one side here.
Economists don't favor democrats but rather seek reality, and the argument that conservative viewpoints are somehow not present in universities, especially in economics departments where Marxists econ profs and Austrian econ profs dine at the same tables and chair the same candidates, is both hilarious to people who have lived experience there and somewhat sad for those same because to communicate reality to folks espousing the silliness that conservatism is under attack at universities is not worth the effort. Truly a shame. Dinner parties are ruined by similar conversations around religion and politics, yet neither matter when the grill is ready.
Economics is less partisan than any other social science, with only three times as many Democrats as Republicans but academia in general is merrily burning its reputation for truth seeking and Economics won’t escape. Not being as bad as psychology or sociology where all conservative academics could meet in a small lecture theatre is a low bar.
I once belonged to a cult. I am no longer in it. It was an organization that preferred its version of reality in spite of evidence. It doesn't perform well among educated folks. Would you argue that a cult that loses members as they gain knowledge and alternative mental models should be protected from the savagery of educated minds due to its loss of adherents?
I'll answer my rhetorical because it's important you understand: no.
John's (and I'd probably be on firm footing to assume your) presumption here is that political affiliation automatically means discriminatory bias and inherent exercises in partisanship. I wouldn't call it a universally bad assumption, but it's also likely not a terribly consistent one across the universe of universities and colleges.
I'm glad you recognize that Economics has a more even partisan distribution than some other fields in social science. Many fields are.
Props to the University of Austin, which John lauds. May they prove to be a bastion of freedom of thought that stands as vanguard against the cravenness that represents itself as the modern marriage of business conservatives, theocrats, and the eat-the-rich contingent, as well as freedom of thought from all other attacks, whether perceived or real.
Note too: the academy has been attacked before, many times. No matter. Ultimately it converges back to the form of a tenured faculty supported be benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge, even and especially when that goes against their benefactors' preferred version of reality. Fields occasionally ossify and lose value, to be replaced one death at a time, but like writing, speech, and real analysis, the academic model is akin to toothpaste and its relationship to the toothpaste tube.
> Would you argue that a cult that loses members as they gain knowledge and alternative mental models should be protected from the savagery of educated minds due to its loss of adherents?
Are you arguing that sociology and anthropology and other more conservative hostile departments are in some way more educated than economists? Or that academia is not a hostile environment for conservatives? I think the pursuit of truth is a great idea and wish more academics believed in it.
> John's (and I'd probably be on firm footing to assume your) presumption here is that political affiliation automatically means discriminatory bias and inherent exercises in partisanship.
I’m not presuming anything. There’s ample research on this. I wouldn’t say there’s automatic discriminatory bias or exercise of partisanship but it exists and it’s not state. See for example https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academicfreedom “Across three Anglophone countries, a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications. Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.”
> I wouldn't call it a universally bad assumption, but it's also likely not a terribly consistent one across the universe of universities and colleges.
Who cares if it’s consistent? If it consistently holds in a subset of schools that’s bad. As it happens one sees open displays of hostility to convervatives across academia, from when Larry Summers was fired as Harvard President to the witch hunt for Josh Katz at Princeton or the hunt for Eric Weinstein at Evergreen College. It’s not rare.
> I'm glad you recognize that Economics has a more even partisan distribution than some other fields in social science. Many fields are.
None in the social sciences. None in the humanities. If you’re arguing that a more even partisan distribution in economics is in some sense good or makes it more trustworthy that says the opposite about other fields.
> [T]he academy has been attacked before, many times. No matter. Ultimately it converges back to the form of a tenured faculty supported be benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge, even and especially when that goes against their benefactors' preferred version of reality.
The research university is not 200 years old. The original academy was closed and Greek academic life lost all vigour at roughly the same time, turning away from anything like production of new knowledge. Universities as producers of knowledge are a new thing and their social role could be usurped by others. Or it could just be lost, for centuries. Good things sometimes just end and are not replaced. Probably not as finishing schools: they’re genuinely good at that.
