ECONOMICS IS WHAT ECONOMISTS DO. Newmark's Door links to the latest public eruption of the ongoing debate in economics about what is important. The article, from Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on a possible division of the Notre Dame economics department into two departments. The doctoral program would be in an economics department that focuses on mainstream approaches. The current department chairman, Richard Jensen (an excellent game theorist whose early work provided a basis for some of my empirical work), observes, "'industry standards' dictate that publication in leading journals is the key to promotion and tenure." Put another way, prestige within the discipline means doing MIT- or Northwestern-style exemplifying theory. Meanwhile, the Marxists, institutionalists, Austrians, and the like "would be consigned to a department focusing on economic thought, social justice, and public policy. But with no graduate program, that would amount to exile and slow death, say the Marxist, labor, and development economists and historians of economic thought who make up a large minority of the 21-member department," reports the Chronicle. Newmark notes that the article "and misleadingly conflates the thoughtful criticisms of Deirdre McCloskey and Ed Leamer" with what he characterizes as less-well-thought-out objections. Professors McCloskey and Leamer, as well as Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, have appeared at at least one American Economic Association session on new directions in economics: the one I attended at Chicago in 1998 drew a large and vocal audience. People disagreed about some things but got on well, there's something about having to work with other academics on a daily basis that brings out the worst. (As an aside, the department at Notre Dame, a relatively small university, has a faculty of 24. Contrast that with the 13 at Northern Illinois University, a largish state university.)

India West, a weblog maintained by an economics graduate student in London (with a history background!) has a long and thoughtful post about the Chronicle article, and he recommends this essay on the relevance of the problems to which the mathematics is applied.

For my part, I see good points being raised by all. Today, in antitrust economics, I had to deal with the political economy of antitrust (perhaps it's the lifestyles of the rich and famous, not the deadweight losses, that give us the antitrust laws: certainly President Roosevelt did not call John D. Rockefeller a "malefactor of misallocation.") On the other hand, without the models of strategic competition (some rooted in game theory) we can't evaluate the claims that the trusts were efficient.