[Vision2020] These are insults, Sir. Insults I tell You!

[heirdoug at netscape.net]

"As a professional academic who has written accurately for 37 years..." 
Nick Gier





Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism

By Peter Klein

Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor 
socialism and interventionism. How was the American university 
transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for 
socialist-inspired culture and politics?

As recently as the early 1950s, the typical American university 
professor held social and political views quite similar to those of the 
general population. Today — well, you've all heard the jokes that 
circulated after the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and 
the former USSR, how the only place in the world where Marxists were 
still thriving was the Harvard political science department.

More generally, US higher education often looks like a clear case of 
the inmates running the asylum. That is, the students who were 
radicalized in the 1960s have now risen to positions of influence 
within colleges and universities. One needs only to observe the 
aggressive pursuit of "diversity" in admissions and hiring, the 
abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly 
politicized "studies" based on group identity, the mandatory workshops 
on sensitivity training, and so on.

A 1989 study for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching used the categories "liberal" and "conservative." It found 
that 70 percent of the professors in the major liberal arts colleges 
and research universities considered themselves liberal or moderately 
liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying themselves as 
conservative or moderately conservative. (Of course, the term "liberal" 
here means left-liberal or socialist, not classical liberal.)

Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein have recently examined academics' 
political affiliations using voter-registration records for 
tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities. They find an 
average Democrat : Republican ratio of 5:1, ranging from 9:1 at 
Berkeley to 1:1 at Pepperdine. The humanities average 10:1, while 
business schools are at only 1.3:1. (Needless to say, even at the 
heartless, dog-eat-dog, sycophant-of-the-bourgeoisie business schools 
the ratio doesn't dip below 1:1.) While today's Republicans are hardly 
anti-socialist — particularly on foreign policy — these figures are 
consistent with a widespread perception that university faculties are 
increasingly unrepresentative of the communities they supposedly serve.

Now here's a surprise: Even in my own discipline, economics, 63 percent 
of the faculty in the Carnegie study identified themselves as liberal, 
compared with 72 percent in anthropology, political science, and 
sociology, 76 percent in ethnic studies, history, and philosophy, and 
88 percent in public affairs. The Cardiff and Klein study finds an 
average D:R ratio in economics departments of 2.8:1 — lower than the 
sociologists' 44:1, to be sure, but higher than that of biological and 
chemical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, 
management, marketing, accounting, and finance.

A survey of American Economic Association members, examined by Daniel 
Klein and Charlotta Stern, finds that most economists support safety 
regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and 
anti-discrimination laws. Another survey, reported in the Southern 
Economic Journal, reveals that "71 percent of American economists 
believe the distribution of income in the US should be more equal, and 
81 percent feel that the redistribution of income is a legitimate role 
for government. Support for these positions is even stronger among 
economists with academic affiliations, and stronger still among 
economists with elite academic affiliations."

Why do so many university professors — and intellectuals more generally 
— favor socialism and interventionism? F. A. Hayek offered a partial 
explanation in his 1949 essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Hayek 
asked why "the more active, intelligent and original men among 
[American] intellectuals … most frequently incline toward socialism." 
His answer is based on the opportunities available to people of varying 
talents.

Academics tend to be highly intelligent people. Given their leftward 
leanings, one might be tempted to infer from this that more intelligent 
people tend to favor socialism. However, this conclusion suffers from 
what empirical researchers call "sample selection bias." Intelligent 
people hold a variety of views. Some are lovers of liberty, defenders 
of property, and supporters of the "natural order" — i.e., defenders of 
the market. Others are reformers, wanting to remake the world according 
to their own visions of the ideal society.

Hayek argues that exceptionally intelligent people who favor the market 
tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success 
outside the Academy (i.e., in the business or professional world). 
Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are 
more likely to choose an academic career. For this reason, the 
universities come to be filled with those intellectuals who were 
favorably disposed toward socialism from the beginning.

This also leads to the phenomenon that academics don't know much about 
how markets work, since they have so little experience with them, 
living as they do in their subsidized ivory towers and protected by 
academic tenure. As Joseph Schumpeter explained in Capitalism, 
Socialism, and Democracy, it is "the absence of direct responsibility 
for practical affairs" that distinguishes the academic intellectual 
 from others "who wield the power of the spoken and the written word." 
This absence of direct responsibility leads to a corresponding absence 
of first-hand knowledge of practical affairs. The critical attitude of 
the intellectual arises, says Schumpeter, "no less from the 
intellectual's situation as an onlooker — in most cases also as an 
outsider — than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself 
lies in his actual or potential nuisance value."

Hayek's account is incomplete, however, because it doesn't explain why 
academics have become more and more interventionist throughout the 
twentieth century. As mentioned above, during the first half of the 
twentieth century university faculty members tended to hold political 
views similar to those held by the general population. What caused the 
change?

To answer, we must realize first that academics receive many direct 
benefits from the welfare state, and that these benefits have increased 
over time.

Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 
percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing 
the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even "private" 
universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of 
their budgets from federal grants and contracts. If you include student 
financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the 
US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 
4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private 
colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal 
government.

In this sense, the most dramatic example of "corporate welfare" in the 
US is the GI Bill, which subsidized the academic sector, bloating it 
far beyond the level the market would have provided. The GI Bill, 
signed by President Roosevelt in 1944 to send returning soldiers to 
colleges and universities, cost taxpayers $14.5 billion between 1944 
and 1956. Federal spending on the latest version, the Montgomery GI 
Bill, is projected at $3.2 billion in 2006 alone.

To see why this government aid is so important to the higher education 
establishment, we need only stop to consider for a moment what 
academics would do in a purely free society. The fact is that most 
academics simply aren't that important. In a free society, there would 
be far fewer of them than there are today. Their public visibility 
would no doubt be quite low. Most would be poorly paid. Though some 
would be engaged in scholarly research, the vast majority would be 
teachers. Their job would be to pass the collective wisdom of the ages 
along to the next generation.

In all likelihood, there would also be far fewer students. Some 
students would attend traditional colleges and universities, but many 
more students would attend technical and vocational schools, where 
their instructors would be men and women with practical knowledge.

Today, many professors at major research universities do little 
teaching. Their primary activity is research, though much of that is 
questionable as real scholarship. One needs only to browse through the 
latest specialty journals to see what passes for scholarly research in 
most disciplines. In the humanities and social sciences, it is likely 
to be postmodern gobbledygook; in the professional schools, 
vocationally oriented technical reports.

Much of this research is funded in the United States by government 
agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes 
of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USDA, and 
others. The large universities have tens of thousands of students, 
themselves supported by government-subsidized loans and grants.

Beyond university life, academics also compete for prestigious posts 
within government agencies. Consider my own field, economics. The US 
federal government employs at least 3,000 economists — about 15% of all 
members of the American Economic Association. The Federal Reserve 
System itself employs several hundred. There are also advisory posts, 
affiliations with important government agencies, memberships of 
federally appointed commissions, and other career-enhancing activities.

These benefits are not simply financial. They are also psychological. 
As Dwight Lee puts it:

Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel 
important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are 
content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to 
improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so 
if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge 
government offers academics the real possibility of living out their 
reformist fantasies.

It's clear, then, that there are many benefits, for academics, to 
living in a highly interventionist society. It should be no wonder, 
then, that academics tend to support those interventions. Economists, 
in particular, play active roles as government advisers, creating and 
sustaining the welfare state that now surrounds us. Naturally, when 
government funds their research, economists in applied fields such as 
agricultural economics and monetary economics are unlikely to call for 
serious regulatory reform in their specialty areas.

Murray Rothbard devotes an interesting chapter of Man, Economy, and 
State, to the traditional role of the economist in public life. 
Rothbard notes that the functions of the economist on the free market 
differ strongly from those of the economist on the hampered market. 
"What can the economist do on the purely free market?" Rothbard asks. 
"He can explain the workings of the market economy (a vital task, 
especially since the untutored person tends to regard the market 
economy as sheer chaos), but he can do little else."

Furthermore, economists are not traditionally popular as policy 
advisors. Economics teaches that resources are limited, that choices 
made imply opportunities forgone, that our actions can have unintended 
consequences. This is typically not what government officials want to 
hear. When they propose an import tariff to help domestic 
manufacturers, we economists explain that this protection will come 
only at the expense of domestic consumers. When they suggest a 
minimum-wage law to raise the incomes of low-wage workers, we show that 
such a law hurts the very people it purports to help by forcing them 
out of work. On and on it goes. As each new generation of utopian 
reformers promises to create a better society, through government 
intervention, the economist stands athwart history, yelling "Remember 
the opportunity cost!"

Over the last several decades, however, the role of the economist has 
expanded dramatically. Partly for the reasons we discussed earlier, the 
welfare state has partly co-opted the profession of economics. Just as 
a higher murder rate increases the demand for criminologists, so the 
growth of the welfare/regulatory state increases the demand for policy 
analysts, antitrust consultants, tax and regulatory experts, and 
various forecasters.

To some degree, the increasing professionalization of the economics 
business must share the blame for this change. The economists' premier 
professional society, the American Economic Association, was itself 
created as an explicitly "progressive" organization. Its founder, the 
religious and social reformer Richard T. Ely, planned an association, 
he reported to a colleague, of "economists who repudiate laissez-faire 
as a scientific doctrine."[7]

The other founding members, all of whom had been trained in Germany 
under Gustav Schmoller and other members of the younger German 
Historical School — the so-called Socialists of the Chair — were 
similarly possessed with reformist zeal. The constitution of the AEA 
still contains references to the "positive role of the church, the 
state and science in the solution of social problems by the 
'development of legislative policy.'"

Fortunately, the AEA subsequently distanced itself from the aims of its 
founders, although its annual distinguished lecture is still called the 
"Richard T. Ely lecture."

If asked to select a single event that most encouraged the 
transformation of the average economist from a critic of intervention 
to a defender of the welfare state, I would name the Second World War. 
To be sure, it was the Progressive Era that saw the permanent 
introduction of the income tax and the establishment of the Federal 
Reserve System. And it was during the Great Depression that Washington, 
D.C. first began to employ a substantial number of economists, to join 
such central-planning organizations as the National Resources Planning 
Board. Still, even in those years, the average economist favored free 
trade, low taxes, and sound money.

World War II, however, was a watershed event for the profession. For 
the first time, professional economists joined the ranks of government 
planning bureaus en masse:

To control prices, as with the Office of Price Administration, led by 
Leon Henderson and later John Kenneth Galbraith. This group included 
prominent "free-market" economists such as Herbert Stein and George 
Stigler.

To study military procurement (what later became known as "operations 
research") with Columbia University's Statistical Research Group 
(including Stigler, Milton Friedman, Harold Hotelling, Abraham Wald, 
Leonard Savage), or with the Army's Statistical Control Group, which 
was led by Tex Thornton, later president of Litton Industries, and his 
"Whiz Kids." The most famous Whiz Kid was Robert McNamara, Thornton's 
leading protégé, who later applied the same techniques to the 
management of the Vietnam War.

Before World War II the primary language of economics, in the 
English-speaking world, was English. Since then, however, economic 
theory has come to be expressed in obscure mathematical jargon, while 
economic history has become a branch of applied statistics.

It is common to attribute this change to the 1947 publication of Paul 
Samuelson's mathematical treatise, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 
and to the development of computers. These are no doubt important. 
However, it is likely the taste of central planning that economists — 
even nominally free-market economists — got during World War II that 
forever changed the direction of the discipline.

What about other public figures, what Hayek called "second-hand dealers 
in ideas" — the journalists, book editors, high-school teachers, and 
other members of the "opinion-molding" class? First, intelligent and 
articulate liberals (in the classical sense) tend to go into business 
and the professions (Hayek's selection-bias argument). Second, many 
journalists trade integrity for access; few are brave enough to 
challenge the state, because they crave information, interviews, and 
time with state officials.

What does the future hold? It is impossible to say for sure, but there 
are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has 
challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never 
before. You don't need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise 
of the new media, new means of sharing information, new ways of 
establishing authority and credibility, imply for universities as 
credential factories? Moreover, as universities become more 
vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with 
specialized, technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry University 
and the University of Phoenix, the fastest-growing US universities.

Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, 
is also on the rise. And traditional media (newspapers and network 
news) are of course rapidly declining, and alternative news sources are 
flourishing.

The current crises in higher education and the media are probably good 
things, in the long run, if they force a rethinking of educational and 
intellectual goals and objectives, and take power away from the 
establishment institutions. Then, and only then, we may see a rebirth 
of genuine scholarship, communication, and education.


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