It tends to go the other way around; politicians and academia pick economists that favor the way they'd like economics to be managed.
Consider that Ludwig Von Mises, one of the most famous economists never held a tenure track position. And Milton Friedman won a nobel prize, including a study of monetary history that damned the fed for helping bring on the great depression -- later nobel prize to Bernanke for works that included the great depression held quite different or even opposing views to Friedman.
My sampling of my interactions with young PhD economists is that they were all Neo-Keynesian, the only people I’ve met who are of the Austrian school were Engineers.
I don’t doubt that the economics profession has been shaped by politics but it appears they are and have been rather willing participants.
Economics involves studying how the economy should be managed, it is an inherently political field. Declaring one school political and another non-political is itself a political sleight of hand.
> Declaring one school political and another non-political
If I were to make a distinction it would be that Austrian is a Positive Theory and Neo-Keynesian is a Normative theory, and I think it’s fair to say that normative theories are more open to political influence than positive ones.
I'm pretty sure UNLV still has Hoppe and they only let go of Rothbard because he died. Which pairs pretty well with the pretty laissez-faire roots of Nevada.
That's like finding that very few PhD evolutionary biologists are young earth creationists. People who study economics wind up being neo-keynesians because that's what the data supports.
Bernanke's opposing views on the Great Depression??
"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." - Bernanke
Read "Conflicting Lessons of the Great Depression"[] chapter of Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner for a summary of differing or opposing viewpoints.
From the introduction:
...As Bernanke, while still only a member of the Fed’s board of governors, said in an address at a ninetieth-birthday celebration for Friedman: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again” (2002b). This seeming similarity, however, disguises significant differences in Friedman’s and Bernanke’s approaches to financial crises...
What on earth are you talking about? Hayek won a Nobel prize for works in economics but isn't a reputable economist?
Friedrich August von Hayek
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974
Born: 8 May 1899, Vienna, Austria
Died: 23 March 1992, Freiburg, Germany
Prize motivation: “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”
Von Mises was a hack. He got accolades as a form of early affirmative action, to somehow balance all the Keynesian economists getting awards.
The whole Austrian "school" of economists basically _prides_ itself on not making predictions but using their dogma to explain whatever happens later. They always have an explanation why everything is a result of rational decisions of individuals. And if anything can't be explained by that, it's just because the government interferes with the perfection of markets.
Keynesian Bernanke on famed Austrian Milton Friedman:
"Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology."
Milton Friedman was not part of the Austrian School. Rather, he was part of the Chicago School. While both schools promote free market economics, there are differences. In fact, one of the biggest differences has to do with their views on central banking, with the Austrian School generally being against fractional-reserve currencies while the Chicago School being more sympathetic. Milton Friedman was a monetarist.
Friedman was a Chicago monetarist, not just an Austrian hack. Pure monetarism doesn't always work, as it ignores irrational behavior, but it's not _useless_. Monetary models work great in steady-state conditions for fine-tuning and in cases where the monetary supply results in high inflation.
The 2008 economic crisis demonstrated that brilliantly. The IS-LM model correctly predicted the outcome of fiscal expansion (lack of inflation, despite trillions in stimulus) and the futility of monetary measures (negative rates in Europe did not result in economic growth).
As someone else said Friedman wasn’t an Austrian. Not even close. The only real similarity is that they both are proponents of free market capitalism. Friedman was a mainstream economist who used mathematical modeling and statistical methods. The majority of Austrians don’t use either and prefer reasoning about individual actions from first principles.
