Freedom in Our Lifetime

"That right-wing nut Brad DeLong is at it again, eh??"

I generally disagree with UC Berkeley Professor and PEIS Chair Professor Brad Delong’s worldview and method of internet discourse (deleting comments, ahem), but it pleases me to see him stirring up anger among extreme leftists in the social sciences. DeLong prides himself on his supposed freedom from bias, which naturally precludes him buying into the bulk of Marxist psychobabble that his fellow Berkeley professors often impart upon naive freshman:

It seems, reading through the lines of what they say, that the modal teacher in those programs approaches their educational mission as though they have a dire and urgent need to deprogram young minds that have been enslaved to the harsh market-ueber-alles doctrines of neoliberal capitalism and classical economics.

The problem is that these nineteen year olds are from the upper-middle class of twenty-first century California and are at base do-gooder meritocrats deeply suspicious of large greedy corporations that repeatedly and recurrently try to sell them junk that they don’t really need. They have not only not been programmed by the ideologies of neoliberal market capitalism and classical economics, they barely know that they exist at an ideological level.

The real problem is that almost anyone who seriously studies economics basically embraces the “neoliberal agenda” in one form or another. Price controls do more harm than good, free trade benefits everyone, and markets coordinate behavior more effectively than central planning, period. It’s hard to claim that the entire economics profession, which is made up of mostly moderate (social-)democrats, are peddling market ideology because of false consciousness or commodity fetishism. Of course, DeLong qualifies this criticism of his colleagues by noting that right-wingers have taken some of the positive conclusions of classical economics too far:

If you are going to turn every class into a wrestle with the ghosts of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, you will look silly unless you first make sure your students know who you are wrestling with, and why your struggle is such a desperate one–why their arguments have force and power…

The source of the force and power of Friedman & Co.’s arguments is sound reasoning and strong evidence; the desperate struggle facing social science departments is that their ideas don’t make sense. Judging by the comments on this post, a lot of leftists would REALLY like to lump DeLong in with the right-wing economists, just to maintain their sketchy caricature of the hegemonic neoliberal order.

DeLong, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and other prominent left-leaning economists are in an awkward position: They must defend their methodology from colleagues who don’t understand markets or the process of wealth creation, all while simultaneously arguing that markets are inherently unfair and doomed to failure without significant government intervention. It’s no wonder that DeLong considers himself pretty middle-of-the-road considering that he probably gets more criticism on campus from hard-core socialists than libertarians.Delong’s blog is subtitled “Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based and Even-Handed.” However, in his world, Marxism means left-wing and constitutionally limited government means right-wing, as if the two positions were equally extreme.

I forget who said it (was it StarChild?), but libertarians sometimes have to form unholy alliances to fight against the greater evils. In this case, I’m more than happy to team up with Professor DeLong to ridicule the Peace and Conflict Studies Department.