The research is sure to be neoliberal think tank garbage not worth reporting on. But of course the whole point of those think tanks is to get published to push the neoliberal project.
After World War II, the NBER expanded its research scope. Arthur Burns succeeded Mitchell as research director. The 1950s and 1960s saw groundbreaking work by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz on monetary policy’s impact on business cycles. Research in labor economics also flourished during this period.
The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.
The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did — for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.
This process took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.
I’m not sure what Harvey meant by these reports being “extremely good and thorough” when he’d be the first to tell you that neoclassical/neoliberal economics are nonsense.
The research is sure to be neoliberal think tank garbage not worth reporting on. But of course the whole point of those think tanks is to get published to push the neoliberal project.
What is the National Bureau of Economic Research?
Milton Friedman, need more be said?
David Harvey: Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
I’m not sure what Harvey meant by these reports being “extremely good and thorough” when he’d be the first to tell you that neoclassical/neoliberal economics are nonsense.