What’s the Matter With the Techno-Economy’s Professorial Class?

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old man (maybe I am that, since I recently retired from day-to-day leadership of ITIF, though I continue to serve as a senior fellow), what the hell happened to academics? Specifically, when did they decide to suspend critical thinking and analysis in favor of left-of-center groupthink? In reality, this has been happening for a long time, but it seems to have worsened.

Again, not to sound like an old man, but when I got my Ph.D. way back in the day, the expectation, if not the mandate, was that you did everything possible to be objective. Even my professors at UNC, who I knew were on the liberal side of the spectrum, still insisted on critical thinking and objectivity. Perhaps that was because, at the time, getting ahead in academia required it. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I see less and less of this. And I think the underlying reason is that an increasing share of academics seem to chafe at the narrow confines of teaching, writing peer-reviewed journal articles, and presenting at academic conferences with only a handful of people in the audience.

As in so many other areas of American life where norms and constraints have broken down, too much of academia is now fame-seeking. You can put a jargony spin on it, calling it “faculty thought leadership” or “domain expertise,” but the whole point is to gain lots of social media followers, be invited to exclusive forums, get on the high-paying speaking circuit, consult for big companies, write bestselling popular books, and even appear on 60 Minutes.

In a world of hypercompetition, academics have to do that, and their universities love it. That’s the definition of “making it” as an academic today.

The way this happens is not by saying, “Well, this particular thing might have this particular effect, but we’re not sure, and there are going to be multiple different paths.” Rather, it is to polemize, disregarding facts, evidence, and data that contradict your polemic, and to hammer the same point home over and over again so that you become known for it. Similar to what Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor Daron Acemoglu has done. That becomes your brand. And brand is everything.

Let me give you an example. Over a decade ago, I asked MIT’s Andrew McAfee to debate me on jobs and technology. I knew one point he would likely make, since he had already done so in a prior publication, was that even manufacturing employment in China declined significantly from 1995 to 2000, just like it did in the United States. Therefore, according to McAfee, U.S. losses had everything to do with automation and nothing to do with trade. (By the way, this remains the conventional wisdom and has been a major barrier to the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.)

But I was ready for that argument. During the debate, I cited a BLS study that showed conclusively that the drop in China’s total manufacturing employment was a statistical artifact due to changes in definition and coverage. So although the official data indicated that China lost many manufacturing jobs, a closer look revealed clear statistical anomalies. Once the reclassification and measurement distortions in the 1990s data were accounted for, the evidence showed that Chinese manufacturing employment continued to increase.

But lo and behold, five months after the debate, with the publication of his book with Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age, McAfee made the same claim (page 184). Did they dispute the BLS? Did they just overlook my critique? Perhaps, but let’s be real: The counterevidence put a monkey wrench into their core argument that technology was killing jobs worldwide, so it was easier to ignore it.

I get how disconcerting it can be when you see data, evidence, and argumentation that challenge your own view of the world. I remember 25 years ago, when Robert Gordon wrote an article claiming that productivity did not benefit American workers. That was a big shock to me because I had devoted much of my professional career to figuring out and advancing policies to boost productivity. And if it turned out that productivity had no effect on workers’ well-being, what was the point of all my work?

You may say that I’m delusional, but I read Gordon’s work in great detail and found its argument unconvincing. Still, I took it seriously and sought out other studies and data on the issue.

But it appears we see this less and less among academics and scholars today. I saw a recent email exchange between two scholars about the nature of capitalism and its benefits to workers (I will keep the names private, as this was shared with me via private email). What struck me was that one of them seemed to have drunk the Kool-Aid of the conventional center-left view on many of these issues, and he seemed utterly uninterested in digging deeper to see whether these mainstream views were actually true, well-supported, or even advantageous.

For instance, he cited a study on the growth of income inequality since 1980 to show that any reforms that do not focus on significant redistribution and limitations on high-income and corporate gains would be meaningless. But he could have gone to the same source, the St. Louis Fed, to look at the growth in median wages. It turns out that if we had limited income inequality to its 1980 levels, median income would go up about $4,800. But St. Louis Fed data on the growth of median wages show that median wages grew by $22,160. That is not chump change. So why reject the current system and seek to overthrow it?

He claimed that only companies are getting the gains but cited no evidence. Academics would typically look at BEA profit rates to see whether this was true. ITIF did so in 2020 and found that nonfinancial domestic profits had remained unchanged over the last 40 years. This finding should give pause to someone who says that the entire neoliberal system is corrupt. But almost no one bothers to look at that data because it gets in the way of the established narrative.

Not to mention, he blithely accepted the notion that industrial concentration has gone up and that this is a key factor in what ails us (unfortunately, as have so many other scholars). But here again, almost no one actually looks at the data. The latest Census Bureau data show virtually no increase in concentration over the last 20 years. Inconvenient facts get in the way of the narrative that has to be pushed: neoliberalism is corrupt, it needs to be radically reshaped, and the focus should be principally on redistribution.

And I suppose no good critique of the economy today would omit the notion that workers are being immiserated while elites reap all the gains. For God’s sake, please do a little research. And don’t fall for the Economic Policy Institute/labor-left narrative that intentionally shows that productivity doesn’t benefit wages. It’s been proven wrong, or at least vastly exaggerated, by CBO, Stephen Rose, and others. But to paraphrase Al Gore, this reality is an inconvenient truth if you want to advance an anti-capitalist, social democratic, redistributionist agenda.

Finally, the email had to say that “left to its own devices, capitalism leads to inequality” and “the concentration and inequality that are weakening democracy.” To the first part, please provide some evidence and logic for that claim. Because, left to its own devices, as long as there is sufficient antitrust enforcement, competition, by definition, limits companies' ability to earn supernormal profits, at least outside of a few industries driven by massive technological innovation for short periods of time.

As to the weakening of democracy, a much more commonsense explanation is the radical shift on both sides of the aisle over the last 20 years to the point where common ground is virtually impossible to achieve. And so, each side wants to rig the system, including by distorting the truth, to prevent the evil other side from gaining ascendancy.

By the way, just so you don’t think I am some kind of Ayn Rand worshipper, I absolutely support a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, and reining in financial capitalism. What I don’t support is moving to an anti-growth, EU-style, social democratic system.

Oh, and here’s one bonus narrative academics love to go along with: the AI jobs myth. The elite class has bought into the lump-of-labor fallacy that AI will lead to fewer jobs, which will lead to reduced labor demand and lower wages. To say that this is now the dominant view is a vast understatement. Almost everyone in this space makes the completely illogical argument that AI-driven productivity will lead to vast joblessness and therefore lower wages.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, there is nothing wrong with saying that AI could lead to job dislocation. It most certainly will, and government should prepare for that. But to then ignore the fact that historically job displacement has not lowered wages or unemployment, and to ignore the second-order effects of productivity on prices, demand, and new job creation, is not being the kind of academic that I was trained to be.

I could go on and on with many, many more examples of intellectual areas where fame-seeking academics and their hangers-on have largely focused on advancing a narrative that fits their story. But I’ll stop for now.

I don’t think there’s any way to really change this, because it is emblematic of the society we live in. One that’s divided into enemy camps, and where individual incentives for fame and fortune have been allowed to run roughshod over more small-c conservative values and expectations of restraint and objectivity.

Why would we expect academics to be any different? The way to get fame and fortune in this space is to have a narrative that you stick to, even if the facts don’t back it up. And if you’re not in the lucky few who can have fame and fortune, you glom on to the narrative because you know professional advancement depends on going along with the dominant view.

Nor do I expect or even believe that interest groups, including left-wing advocacy groups, should suddenly start striving for objectivity. Like all political actors, they’re going to use information in ways that support their advocacy. I don’t have a problem with that because most people in Washington understand that advocates will present information biased toward their interests. But what they don’t expect is for academics to be part of that apparatus. And that’s what’s changed today.

A quick side note: I do expect journalists, though, to have a higher standard. You may ask when I fell off the turnip truck. I know I’m living in the past when I say that journalists at least used to make some attempt to be objective on these issues. It saddens me to admit those days are long gone, at least for the most part.

So maybe all we can hope for is for users of academic information, particularly policymakers, to understand that the days of objectivity are over. Most of the information they’re going to get, at least in this subject area, is going to be deeply influenced by bias and ideology. With any luck, policymakers will recognize that and do the work academics increasingly avoid: seeking some level of truth. One can only dream.