American Economists: Not So Free-Market After All

| Peter Klein |

I’ve blogged previously about Daniel Klein’s work on the political identities and policy views of economists and other academics (here and here). A new paper by Klein and Charlotta Stern surveys American Economic Association members on various policy issues, finding that “about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. . . . Even the average Republican AEA member is ‘middle-of-the road,’ not free-market.”

Why are economists almost universally perceived as strong supporters of the free market? Klein and Stern offer several conjectures. One is that economists tend to be strong supporters of (international) free trade and at least partial liberalization, making it look like economists support free-market principles more generally. Another is that most academics in the social sciences and humanities are strongly opposed to the free market, making economists look like radical free-marketeers by comparison. Yet another is that most of the strong supporters of the free market (in academia) are economists, leading to the mistaken inference that most economists are strong supporters of the free market.