On Tuesday, April 24, 2001, at 09:21 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Perhaps the field has changed since I was in college, but back then,
> academic econometrics had the reputation of being dominated by
> Marxists -
> the more-Scientific Socialists who understood that if you want a
> centrally planned economy, you have to measure it so you can control it,
> as opposed to the purely political Scientific Socialists who believed in
> centrally planning an economy based on class struggle and rewarding
> heroic truck factory workers and shooting bourgeois greedy bankers and
> other warm fuzzy liberal values stuff.
>
> While the US government doesn't strongly believe in central planning,
> it has still supported that kind of field because if you want to
> spend lots of money, either on liberal welfare state programs,
> right-wing Anti-Commie military-industrial-complex welfare programs,
> or good old fashioned bi-partisan pork for your friends,
> you need to know how and where to squeeze the economy to maximize
> revenue without overly disrupting the processes that generate it.
>
I'll provide a data point about what corporations want: they hire a
_lot_ of MBAs, but not a lot of "economists." Sure, MBAs have to
complete a series of econ courses, probably based on Samuelson and the
various micro- and macro-econ courses, but mostly corporations are
seeking those with tools to manage businesses, markets, product lines,
etc. Classical economics is not a focus.
And as Bill said in another post, Samuelson generated a very big book
mainly (it seems) to sell more copies. Sort of like similar big books in
molecular biology and organic chemistry.
--Tim May
