Patronage, not analysis, explains academic economists’ crisis positions.

Evidence

If the public was tracking the record of the economists (which it wasn’t—there was a crisis on), they would be justified in wondering: Did these market designers have any clear idea of what might have caused the crisis in the first place? Did they even have any expertise regarding the financial sector? What made this about-face so confusing is that the phantom public could not trace it to any major shift in the Treasury’s position: the market designers had registered no dissent about the Treasury’s plan to inject capital into the banks, at least so long as it was poised to use their auctions to do so. But once they were out of the running for any auction contracts, and kicked out into the cold, market designers merely flipped and adopted the rhetoric of the TARP opponents. So how much of their analytical stance can be traced to the icy slopes of logic, and how much to the fickle fiduciary considerations of their patrons? — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 874

Categorization

• QUESTION: The fiduciary-vs-logic question is posed rhetorically by Mirowski but worth quantifying: do economists’ public stances correlate with their funding streams?
• XREF: connects to: Academic finance theorists used models for insight, not profit-seeking. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1110; Academic economists’ private financial ties predict weaker calls for regulation — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 2129; Academics who shaped the crisis conceal their consulting ties while playing impartial arbiters — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 572 (+3 more)