Monday 12 January 2015

Quote of the week: economics edition

The one field in the social sciences where there is the least presence of post-modern oppression-“privilege” types is Economics, which prompts me to propose the theorem that the presence of politically correct nonsense in an academic department is inversely proportional to the emphasis placed on rigorous regression modeling in the discipline (or knowledge of ancient languages).
That's Steve Hayward at Powerline, via Catallaxy Files, HT: Jason Krupp.

During the NZ summer, NZ Twitter gets especially stupid. After one particularly inane round of offence-taking, I even saw the suggestion that it's a form of privilege not to take offence at others' tweets. I don't know how any of these people manage to function in the real world.

6 comments:

  1. It's possible to understand privilege and oppression without being on the Left, you know.

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  2. I have always found allegations of ideological bias and implicit value judgements in economics to be rather funny, but they are serious allegations.

    With the ideological bias in value judgement in saying that the demand curve slopes downwards, that there are unintended consequences in human action and that incentives matter in all fields of human endeavour?

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  3. Agree entirely. But libertarians, who either should or who do, don't typically go on "check your privilege" rants or deny agency to those who are oppressed by saying it's a mark of privilege to be able to choose to not take offence at stuff.

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  4. Possibly because we value the individual more highly than other ideologies, so we tend to believe in an individual's ability to deal with their oppression on their own terms. But (thinking out loud), is that naive of us?

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  5. i don't think that is necessarily the case. I think you can acknowledge individual agency without mythologizing individual responsibility as conservatives do

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