From Mike Konczal, on his first experience with PhD-level macroeconomics:
Speaking as someone who has taken graduate coursework in “continental philosophy”, and been walked through the big hits of structural anthropology, Hegelian marxism and Freudian feminism, that graduate macroeconomics class was by far the most ideologically indoctrinating class I’ve ever seen. By a mile. There was like two weeks where the class just copied equations that said, if you speak math, “unemployment insurance makes people weak and slothful” over and over again. Hijacking poor Richard Bellman, the defining metaphor was the observation that if something is on an optimal path any subsection is also an optimal path, so government just needs to get out of the way as the macroeconomy is optimal absent absurdly defined shocks and our 9.6% unemployment is clearly optimal.
Ideology is everywhere, and it’s often strongest in the very places that pretend the hardest that they don’t cater to it. Economics, unfortunately, is still an immature discipline, much more complex than something like chemistry or physics, and that means that if you pick your assumptions carefully you can prove almost anything you want. And economists do.
