Charles Ferguson amplifies on his film's assertion (mentioned below) that many academic economists have been paid so much by the financial industry that their veracity is suspect:
Over the past 30 years, the economics profession—in economics departments, and in business, public policy, and law schools—has become so compromised by conflicts of interest that it now functions almost as a support group for financial services and other industries whose profits depend heavily on government policy. The route to the 2008 financial crisis, and the economic problems that still plague us, runs straight through the economics discipline. And it's due not just to ideology; it's also about straightforward, old-fashioned money.And then he cites particular examples, including well-known names like Glenn Hubbard, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, and Marty Feldstein.Prominent academic economists (and sometimes also professors of law and public policy) are paid by companies and interest groups to testify before Congress, to write papers, to give speeches, to participate in conferences, to serve on boards of directors, to write briefs in regulatory proceedings, to defend companies in antitrust cases, and, of course, to lobby. This is now, literally, a billion-dollar industry.
At a time when we're up in arms about corporate spending on political campaigns, who knew we'd have to worry about the experts' loyalties too?
Posted by Linkmeister at October 6, 2010 11:38 AM | TrackBack