I watched a video by Gary Stevenson the other day and it sheds light on our current issues.
He was a trader for Citibank and for awhile their highest paid trader. He essentially made a fortune (mostly for the bank but also for himself) by betting that after the 2008 GFC inequality would only increase, that we wouldn't go back to "normal".
He says that the best economists in the world are traders. Why? Because they have this big number over their head, their profit and loss ("P&L") that everyone at the bank can see. It also defines their bonus. All the finance and econ people in college are trying to become traders.
Then you have journalists. Any of them with an econ background have basically failed to become traders. Journalists self-select to reflect the views of their organization, famously articulated by Noam Chomsky in an interview [1].
And then you have Econ PhDs. Their only paths are to go work for academia, to produce more Econ PhDs or to work for think tanks and the like, essentially no different to the journalists. They play the same role medical researchers working for the tobacco did in the 20th century.
You see this with the dominance in Western economics academia of the Austrian School [2], which isn't precisely the same as neoliberalism but the differences are nuanced.
The Austrian school does not dominate academia, not even close. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to says it's a heterodox school, meaning it's not mainstream.
> He says that the best economists in the world are traders. Why? Because they have this big number over their head, their profit and loss ("P&L") that everyone at the bank can see. It also defines their bonus.
This is kinda like the difference between climate science vs. weather forecasting. Being good at making short-term returns without giving a shit about the long-term damage it does is not the same as economic policy.
He was a trader for Citibank and for awhile their highest paid trader. He essentially made a fortune (mostly for the bank but also for himself) by betting that after the 2008 GFC inequality would only increase, that we wouldn't go back to "normal".
He says that the best economists in the world are traders. Why? Because they have this big number over their head, their profit and loss ("P&L") that everyone at the bank can see. It also defines their bonus. All the finance and econ people in college are trying to become traders.
Then you have journalists. Any of them with an econ background have basically failed to become traders. Journalists self-select to reflect the views of their organization, famously articulated by Noam Chomsky in an interview [1].
And then you have Econ PhDs. Their only paths are to go work for academia, to produce more Econ PhDs or to work for think tanks and the like, essentially no different to the journalists. They play the same role medical researchers working for the tobacco did in the 20th century.
You see this with the dominance in Western economics academia of the Austrian School [2], which isn't precisely the same as neoliberalism but the differences are nuanced.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics