Having lived many years at a university, my opinion is that most economists (and other social scientists) are brainwashed into accepting the dominant paradigms and ways of looking at things. Typically, you can only be a wee bit creative to get a doctorate. That’s true of the average professorial drone. Make just enough of a contribution that your approving committee doesn’t feel that their world view is being threatened but that you’ve added to the so-called knowledge. It doesn’t pay to challenge the conventional wisdom by too great a degree, or you get too many publication rejections. It pays to become a court advisor and consultant. You get rewards for staying within the system. Also, it’s extremely easy to grab a textbook and teach what it says without questioning it, and the texts are conventional. A mechanistic view of the economy (even the concept of an economy) makes it seem like there’s a substance and content to the subject when there really isn’t that much. It lends itself to math — and math skills are used to separate the men from the boys, i.e., create a fictitious pecking order in which the winners secure themselves against questioning.
So the subsidized higher education system has many faults, especially in the social sciences. My biologist brother says the same goes for useless studies done in his field, and I can well imagine the same in physics and chemistry. The government employment of experts in all fields and the government funds lavished on universities have caused massive malinvestment in physical and human capital. There is a higher education bubble. A large shakeout lies ahead.
