The jealousy of powerful men

Economic wisdom from the streets. Not Prof. DeLong's dish.

J. Bradford DeLong is a powerful man himself, a full professor of economics at UC Berkeley and once a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration. But he struggles to understand the thin skins of other powerful economists when it comes to admitting the contributions of women to the discipline.

In mid- and late-20th century America, the mathematical turn of economics made it much less friendly to women coming in. And then, I think, the thing snowballed—in large part due to the aggressive seminar culture spreading from Chicago, focused on testing ideas in a blast furnace and also establishing an intellectual pecking-order rather than building a harmonious community. But why it then takes the form of aggressive misogyny I do not know ...

[He quotes] Rakesh Bhandari: ‘I don't understand what is it about economics as it is, neoclassical and mainstream macro, that would attract such aggressive misogynists to it. I can't imagine such discussions in sociology or anthropology. Perhaps philosophy and political science?…

On the—admittedly few—occasions when I have talked frankly to people who strike me as in the same sociological space as the toxic posters ... what comes off is absolute rage at affirmative action.

The argument that our ticket-punching indicators of “quality” are very noisy, that women face huge headwinds in our profession, and thus that given those headwinds a woman who is at the 95th [percentile] of “ticket punching” “excellence” is almost surely a better asset to the university than a man who is at the 98th [percentile] —they are neurologically incapable of allowing that or other arguments that we do not want an intellectual monoculture enter their brains.

Hence they are all 100% certain that women as a group are stealing their rightful jobs and keeping them from having the careers they deserve. And every individual woman thus becomes someone to be dissed because she is a participant in this great female conspiracy to do them down.

Or such is my guess.

I read this forming an image of the women so dissed as white. Think what these great men make of Black men and even Black women in economics.

It's enough to make one wish for the Great Replacement. We might learn something about how to make the process of making and organizing all the fruits of land and human ingenuity serve all the planet's beings with a different cast of students of economy. Or perhaps not. This will be a worthwhile experiment.