Tyler Cowen points to a very interesting article on European economists at US universities.
One-third of the faculty of Harvard University’s economics department hails from Europe. At the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, half of the finance department’s faculty is European. And these schools aren’t alone: European economists are overrepresented at all first-tier American universities and have had a huge influence on economic thinking, doing cutting-edge research in areas ranging from modeling financial markets to assessing risk.
These academics—most of them young rising stars escaping the mediocrity and politicization of economics departments in their countries of origin—see top American schools as the best places to study and teach. “When one wants to become a real economist, to accumulate knowledge and recognition, one has no choice but the United States,” says Chicago’s Luigi Zingales, an Italian who is a leader in the hot field of financial regulation. He’s right—for the time being, anyway.
Cowen has commented on this before.
In percentage terms, fewer and fewer economists are Americans by birth and upbringing. Non-Americans are less likely to be fully fluent in English, which encourages mathematics. Non-Americans also tend to be less market-oriented in their thought. In any case they are less likely to stand along traditional U.S. ideological fault lines or even share ideological fault lines with each other.
The ideology issue is quite interesting.
Obsolete and disproved Marxist and socialist thinking also remained strong within European universities, including in economics departments. Many young economists, scientifically oriented and so recognizing the superiority of free markets, found the climate intellectually stultifying. It remains the case that most French and Italian universities teach economics as a philosophical subject—with opinions mattering as much as facts—not a scientific subject. A Keynesian, statist perspective still dominates most European curricula: free-market professors are an embattled minority.
American economic departments were—and are—much more rigorous and nonpartisan by comparison. Yet isn’t there an ideological opposition between, say, the University of Chicago, known as a cradle of free-market theory, and Harvard, a supposedly liberal campus? “This perception hasn’t much to do with reality,” Bertrand responds. “We are scientists, above all; ideologies do not dictate our research or our teaching.” Alesina, a strong proponent of markets, agrees: “The notion of Harvard being liberal and Chicago free-market doesn’t coincide with academic reality.”
Perhaps Cowen’s ‘less market-orinetated’ European economist is considered a raving right-winger back in Europe.
