I am really learning from Dean Baker's The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. I have long read Baker's columns on economic policy but his book really spells our how narrow and how uniformed we liberals are in national and state policy debates.
I once spent about a "New York Minute" in a doctoral program in economics and I soon saw it wasn't for me. To plow through a doctoral program and survive as a policy and social liberal takes all kinds of endurance and courage. You have to hang on to your convictions in courses on price theory, money and banking, economic development and on and on. The same goes for law school. I dropped out of both, for much the same reasons.
My economics program was at the University of Texas just as it was converting the economics department into a nationally-recognized department. That meant that the old time professors who had read Veblen or John Commons (or who were actually students of Commons) were soon slated for the sidelines.
These economists were termed the institutionalists and they never have enjoyed much prestige among economists in the post-WWII era. The reigning presence at Texas had been Clarence Ayers, who was trained at the University of Chicago, and had once taught C. Wright Mills and Talcott Parsons. But his days were coming to a close.
Because the primary goal of my doctoral program was training in Chinese, I knew that the government wanted me to get a Ph.D. in development economics and head straight for Rand or the CIA or somewhere similar, and I quickly concluded this wasn't for me. And so I resigned a lucrative fellowship after spending four years putting myself through college.
But economists have much to teach us and especially economists like Baker who know how little we know about, say, how the Federal Reserve works, or what what sharing-policy could do for unemployment, or the Treasury and international currency could affect the level of U.S. manufacturing.
Baker's book is a real eye-opener and I'm sorry I waited so long to return to economic policy for liberals and progressives.
