Common sense and the economistic worldview
It’s Sunday and thus time for another break from monetary economics. Because of heavy grading early this week, I may not post anymore for 3 or 4 days. But I have a couple interesting ideas for later in the week.
A New York Times article once reported that economists in academia tend to vote about 3 to 1 Democratic, whereas other academics vote about 7 to 1 Democratic. Of course the general public tends to split about 50/50 between Democratic and Republican voters. What should we make of this pattern? A few years ago I began thinking about this issue and came up with a hypothesis that is based on the distinction between worldviews and values. I think economists tend to be people with liberal values and a right wing worldview. BTW, I haven’t had time to do much research in this area, so I claim no originality for the ideas here. (Indeed, I believe that Bryan Caplan is far ahead of me in exploring the worldview issue that I discuss here.) However in future posts on issues like political art, I think I might be able to make some original observations.