A fascinating project that came into being last year is the IGM Economic Experts Panel. The panel asks dozens of economists from the most prestigious universities what their views are on a variety of policy issues. Each economist responds with Strongly agree, agree, uncertain, disagree, or strongly disagree and indicates a level of confidence on their response.
Take a look through the list of polls, the panel has been posed all sorts of fascinating questions. What I find striking is that there is a large degree of agreement amongst mainstream economists on a wide variety of issues. One common criticism of the panel I've heard is that it doesn't represent some of the "fringe" views in economics, like Austrians or Marxists. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see what some of the biggest names in economics can and cannot agree on.
Its very interesting to see that there is trend on how these economists will respond - close to a 50/50 balance which is very fascinating to me. It makes a clear point that economics is a dynamic subject a fully ingrained in belief hence we will probably see general similarities in responses. That being said we may not be able to come to anything really as far as this surveys are concerned we need a more international collection of economists to make the results more convincing.
ReplyDeleteGood point, I hadn't noticed that all the economists were affiliated with American Universities. Part of the reason is that they were trying to draw entirely from the top 5 universities, all of which are in the States. And while some of the economists at those universities are not from the United States, there are still probably some biases.
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