Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Howard Kurtz Edition)

Wonkette notes a typical Kurtzianism:

Wonkette - College Faculties Infested with Liberals: Howard Kurtz reports: 'College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.' Or maybe that should have been, Howard Kurtz interprets. Here's an actual excerpt from the new study, which is based on a study from six years ago: 'The 1999 study found 72% of faculty to the left of center, including 18% who were strongly left...'

So, fewer than one out of five evil liberal professors actually identify themselves as strongly left? Does Kurtz actually know any 'conspiratorial conservatives'? Believe us, Howard, they can conspire way more imaginatively than that! Once again, the insular nature of the liberal MSM reveals itself...

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UPDATE: Ezra Klein throws down the gauntlet:

Ezra Klein: Why Professors Tilt Left: "it's time to stop the head-scratching. Being a libertarian is perfectly fine, as is being an economic conservative and a neocon. But the weird merging of the Christian Right, the Neocons, and Karl Rove's theories that's currently directing the Republican party makes no sense at all. It's an administration where the President believe the 'jury's still out' on how the earth was formed and the Senate Majority Leader -- a trained doctor! -- thinks AIDS can be transmitted through tears (to say nothing of the House Majority Leader who couldn't go to Vietnam because those damn minorities had gobbled up all the spots).

And so people who care about their party making sense shy away from Bush. Sometime they find more elements of their beliefs in him than in the Democrats, and so they pull the lever for the 'R', but the more that intellectual coherence matters, the less they make that bargain. And so as you climb up the rungs of academia, where internal coherency and intellectual rigor become values to live and die by, you find fewer Republicans. Simple as that...

Ezra is completely right.

A good deal of it, in economics at least, is that you simply cannot dare not--not if you want to look others in the eye (or yourself) adopt the line of the Bush administration. Consider what I was writing about yesterday--White House Social Security point man and "substance" person Charles Blahous, and his claims like:

BLAHOUS: It's also not a problem that, under the current system, we can grow our way out of. The current system is designed so that benefits grow as fast as wages and the economy grow. And what this means is that if the economy does grow faster than projected, then wages will grow faster than projected; we will collect higher revenues, to be sure, and we might be able to push off that 2018 date, or 2042 date by a few years, but we would also owe more benefits as a consequence of the higher growth.

No economist--no real academic economist--would dare to endorse this. The closest anyone comes is the Council of Economic Advisers, in its "Three Questions About Social Security", which states:

While economic growth makes it easier to sustain some government spending programs, this does not apply to Social Security, because Social Security benefits themselves increase with earnings.

But it immediately pulls back and corrects itself in the next paragraph (emphases added):

Some commentators have wondered whether the Social Security Trustees have underestimated future productivity growth and, thereby, future economic growth. If productivity grows faster than expected, the economy will indeed grow more rapidly, as will worker wages. But this won’t provide that much help to Social Security. As workers’ wages rise, their payments to Social Security go up, providing a short-term benefit to the program. However, their future benefits increase as well. Thus, while there is a short-term benefit to Social Security from economic growth, the long term benefit is relatively small. It is almost like running on a treadmill—-getting ahead requires more than is reasonable to expect. Specifically, the indexation of initial Social Security benefits to wages means that increased benefits offset much of the higher revenue from faster wage growth...

Note the "that much," the "long-term benefit is relatively small," the "almost," and the "much." What these mean is this: "Given current benefit and funding structures, an 0.1 percentage point increase in the long-run growth rate of productivity reduces the 75-year deficit number by about 0.1 percentage point; an 0.1 percentage point increase in the long-run rate of population growth due to higher net immigration reduces the 75-year deficit number by about 0.3 percentage points." Are these effects "small"? Does it mean that faster growth wouldn't help? Put it this way: an 0.6% markup of annual productivity and an 0.4% markup of annual population growth due to higher immigration would together wipe out the 75-year deficit.

It's acceptable in academia to be a Democrat. It's acceptable to be a libertarian. It's simply embarrassing to be a Republican.

Comments

[david]

I'd love to believe this, but is there any evidence of Republican economists suffering career damage for shilling? Not my field of research, but I haven't come across much casually.

[Ottnott]

Meanwhile, in another large, powerful institution that sucks up huge amounts of taxpayer money and molds the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people...

"The poll found:
•About half described their political views as conservative or very conservative; four in 10 called themselves moderate; and only 7 percent called themselves liberal."

That's from an 2003 Military Times poll of active-duty service members. The sampling wasn't scientific (relied on voluntary return of a mailed survey).
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2513919.php

Another result from that poll:
"A poll conducted late last year by the Military Times found that 57 percent of those surveyed consider themselves Republican, while 13 percent identified with the Democrats. Among the officer corps the numbers were different. Nearly 66 percent of officers considered themselves Republican compared with 9 percent Democratic."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5964655/

We could bring better political balance to both institutions with a massive personnel swap.

Any takers?

[peBird]

You know, I would like to endorse that sentiment. But I think there are still relatively reasonable Republicans somewhere. And then there are these alien extremists from the planet Zortec that have taken over the government.

[modus potus]

"There's other reasons why intelligent academics are left of center."

Do tell...

[A. Zarkov]

Academia tended liberal long before the Republicans went rotten. Or at least the complaints that they were too liberal, after all “God and Man at Yale” was written more than 50 years ago. [now commenting from the Commonwealth of VA, having left the Golden State]

[alex]

I've been thinking a fair bit about this recently too, since the little Volokhs seem to be harping about it.

My background is in the hard sciences, and it is obvious why there should be fewer Republicans than Democrats in those fields. Take biology: natural selection as the theory that explains the evolutionary data is the foundation of biology. If Republicans reject natural selection, they have no place in biology. Physics is the same: if you don't accept the evidence for the Big Bang, then you shouldn't be a physics professor. You'd be an academic fraud. So of course there are fewer Republicans in these fields.

But it goes deeper than this. The Republicans have long embraced a culture of anti-intellectualism. And the Religious Right has gone further and embraced a culture of ignorance, preferring dogma over scientific fact and empirical evidence.

It's preposterous for them to turn around and claim that they should have equal representation in university faculties.

[tango]

I'd be curious to know if this study restricts itself solely to professors in the humanities and social sciences departments, as others in the past have. Let's not talk to any of those business or engineering folks, no way...

[tango]

I should add after doing the double click-through and RFTA'ing, yes, it does include the engineering and business faculty.

[A. Zarkov]

“Physics is the same: if you don't accept the evidence for the Big Bang, then you shouldn't be a physics professor.”

You are dismissing the capacity people have for double think (not limited to Republicans). They don’t come any smarter than Newton (founded modern physics), yet (from Wikipedia)
“As he is known as one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived, it's interesting to remark that the Bible was Sir Isaac Newton's greatest passion. He devoted more time to the study of Scripture than to science, and said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."
Then we have Newton’s alleged affinity for astrology (at a time it was unpopular) see M. Gauquelin, The Cosmic Clocks: From Astrology to a Modern Science.
I know lots of people in the hard sciences and they are about evenly divided between being Democrats and Republicans. I know a fundamentalist Christian who has a PhD in control theory and who has written several applied math books. I know fundamentalist Christians who voted against Bush and liberal Jews who voted for him. I know atheists who voted for him. Face facts a person’s political and religious beliefs can really diverge. Are you trying to tell me that a guy like Bainbridge (professor of law at UCLA) is just plain stupid because he supports Bush? Go read his excellent business law books, and then tell me he is not a first rate intellectual. If you visit his web site you will see he supports Bush.

[jim brady]

Left of what center exactly?

[anne]

What increasingly troubles me is that harsh attacks on teachers at all levels of schooling and attacks on thoughtful higly educated people in general are both successfully intimidating and undermining of respect for education. This is serious and fearful.

[ktheintz]

Kurtz and other right-wingers like him cite that sort of statistic for one, and only one, reason: to justify the installation of an ideological quota system in American higher education.

[sm]

Statistics and surveys like this assume that the center of the possible ideological spectrum is identical with some chosen American midpoint out of some notional American spectrum.

Half the current problems come out of this kind of stupid self-absorption.

[angry moderate]

Academia rewards novelty-seeking. It's better to be slightly wacky, than staid and predictable. Appeals to tradition and authority are not valued. It's no surprise that this environment will be congenial to the left [and libertarians], just as the military environment is congenial to the right. An extreme bias to novelty-seeking is not a good way to run a polity - so buckley was right to say he'd rather be ruled by the first thousand names in the cambridge phone book than the harvard faculty - but it is a reasonable way to run a university.

[Liberal Chris]

Someone who is educated and smart enough to be an academic is also skilled enough to enter into a lot of careers. So there is a self selection bias. Out of all the people smart enough to be academics, the ones most interested in, say, making a ton of money will choose to go be I-bankers. At any rate, academia therefore draws more from a subset of the highly intelligent: those who tend to place lifestyle above money and power, those who most enjoy secular reasoning and empirical inquiry, those who are creative thinkers, etc.

[theCoach]

Would the good professor protest a talk by someone as compromised as Mankiw at Berkeley?

[kharris]

Sorry to bring this up again, but we aren't being helped much by our journalists. Yesterday, Bloomberg gave Stiglitz a lot of time on their TV feed. When it came time to match him up with a rightie to stir a little debate, who'd he get? Luskin. Yup. Bloomberg producers think Stiglitz and Luskin belong in the same discussion.

What did Luskin have to say? Only that taxes will solve every problem, and that if Stiglitz didn't agree, it was because he was putting his politics ahead of his economics. He then challenged Stiglitz to say what he would do to fix the "problem" with Social Security without resorting to letting tax cuts expire. In other words, Luskin insisted that a Nobel Prize winner dance to his tune, narrowing the range of answers to exclude any he didn't like. Thank you, Bloomberg.

Luskin's own answer (you've already guessed) was to allow tax-cut-inspired growth do all the work.

[Bruce Webb]

On the issue of productivity two points:

One you can argue in the abstract whether increases in productivity are always offset by the increases in real wages, and provide calculations. Or you can confront the actual numbers in the tables of the Social Security Report. Per the Trustees hitting the numbers of Low Cost produces fully funded Trust Fund. And every economic and demographic factor ever cited is built into the models. Bring numbers to the table, show me that the labor participation figures, covered worker ratios, assumed mortality and immigration totals under Low Cost are actually too optimistic. Then we can talk. But resorting to first principles gets you nowhere. We are soundly beating the productivity numbers, the math shows that has a positive effect on solvency, and privatizers need to start deploying some numbers of their own.

Two, the fact is that God is not making any more Boomers. However you structure Social Security and Medicare and whatever the level of benefits you posit, a bigger economy means lower carrying costs for the fixed population of Boomers relative to a smaller economy.

[hyh]

It's about power. The current incarnation of the Republican Party, not unlike part versions of both Dem and GOP, achieved and maintains power by pitting we against they. Republicans ran against government. Now that they *are* the government, and Fox and favorable coverage of Bush policies has weakened the utility of "liberal media,"
Republicans are running against academia.

A more cynical explanation would be that given that the strategy is to break down those institutions that enable individuals to wield influence above and beyond what their bank accounts should allow.

[steve kyle]

The Republicans lie. Then they claim its their faith and you cant argue with them. Or they simply deny reality as in many economic debates. So, if you count denial of obvious facts as part of wanting coherence in your thoughts then OK.

But I think there is more to it than that. You can have a perfectly logical and coherent train of thought that is completely out in lala land. For example, consider the interminable debates over how many fairies can dance on the head of pin that people used to have a few centuries ago. Admirable coherence, and logical too within the assumptions that they start with. But total fairy tales (ha ha joke, joke). So, part of the problem is the Republican willingness to simply abandon ship on the whole idea of establishing facts and working from there.

Need I say it again? They only care about winning. If lying will get them there then thats fine with them. Coherence? Whats that mean again?

[David W.]

Left of what center exactly?

Exactly. Nominal political labels only serve those with political axes to grind. If I was in academia, I would be whetting my own axe to defend my profession against those who would slander it for their own partisan ends.

[anne]

There is no problem with argument, politics can be full of fierce arguments, and we are political creatures, but political arguments in a democratic setting need to be conducted without implicit threat and with honesty. Increasingly, the threat is there. Imagine a pleasant young rabbit wishing to show us how a young girl in Vermont collects maple syrup. The girl however happens to have 2 mothers, and a child with 2 mothers can not be interviewed by a rabbit however well meaning a rabbit without an immediate really explicit threat to limit funding for public television. We are confronted with threatening discourse and dishonesty.

[anne]

Richard Niebuhr was a stopped in the middle of a lecture on uncertainty, the doubt that is everywhere in "Moby Dick," some years ago. A student asked Niebuhr whether he believed in God. Niebuhr thought for a time and then answered that he did not know. The lecture went on, and no one could ever do more with "Moby Dick." I hear the words still.

I did not think about Niebuhr's answer, taking it as a matter of course for an honest person. After lecture there was a lunch. All that was talked about around me was Niebuhr's answer, but what was startling was the anger the answer provoked. Should Niebuhr have been afraid to be honest in lecture? Should such an answer be by any means vaguely discrediting?

[anne]

Huh? Suddenly we are pointing out communists? Huh? Is this a Seinfeld comedy with Kramer teaching Mickey about corned beef not being served under communism becuase the meats have a class system with salami much below corned beef. So no corened beef under communism. Well, unless you're in the Politbureau. Huh? All Kramer and Mickey wanted to do was work as Santa and Elf for Christmas. Of course, George could be a communist to meet women and Elaine found the men rather glamorous except for drab shirts. Huh :)

[Jennifer]

Brad,

Better watch out for Anne, she has switched sides. Who would a' thunk it? Oh Anne, how could you?

[Jennifer]

There, I am naming names. Will that do? Can I name names? I always wanted to name names. Please anyone give me some names and I will name them. We will root out liberals from all the hiding places they choose.

[Jennifer]

Anne, they made me do it, really they did. What a hoot though.

[john c. halasz]

Emm... wasn't Newton a Unitarian?

[John Emerson]

Newton was an Arian. Sort of like a Unitarian, theologically speaking, but less mellow. Theodoric the Goth, who destroyed the Roman Empire, is the second most famous Arian.

One of Schiavo's MDs was on Scarsborough the other day and just about exploded. Scarborough was giving the "shape of the earth: opinions differ" treatment to Schiavo's diagnosis and prognosis, but he wasn't even factually well informed enough to do a good job of that. After he ushered the MD out, Scarborough commented on how unreasonable the doctor had been, not at all interested in civil discussion but just losing his temper all the time.

The Republican Party has been taken over by its right wing, and the media have been stupefied (with a rightward slant). Government is being colonized at high levels by Republican droids, so now the executive, the legislature, the media, and increasingly the courts are in the same demented hands.

It's worse than you think. There is no depth to which they will not sink, and the resistance is weak.

[darthdarthbinks]

There was a study done on scientists (natural/hard variety) on rates of religious belief.

Something like 10% of the general population are agnostic/atheist. Some higher percentage of scientists are agnostic/atheist. That percentage increased if you look at the subset of academic scientists and hit 80% if you looked at members of the National Academy of Sciences.

I would argue that the religious views and political leanings are correlated.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

KHarris:
You said

What did Luskin have to say? Only that taxes will solve every problem, and that if Stiglitz didn't agree, it was because he was putting his politics ahead of his economics. He then challenged Stiglitz to say what he would do to fix the "problem" with Social Security without resorting to letting tax cuts expire. In other words, Luskin insisted that a Nobel Prize winner dance to his tune, narrowing the range of answers to exclude any he didn't like. Thank you, Bloomberg.

Was Luskin saying that STIGLITZ was saying taxes will solve all problems? Or that tax CUTS will solve them?

Aside from picky editorializing, have a little sympathy with Bloomberg. Who, after all, COULD they get? When the debate is between sense and nonsense, it gets hard to find someone reasonable to take the other side.