To conclude that the movie did not raise ethical issues among economists, I think you'd have to be closing your eyes.  Call me naive, but I was surprised. I would never have guessed that Larry Summers had earned a $10 million paycheck from Wall Street.  I mean, I figured he earned a good salary over there at Harvard, but I would have considered a professor to be the sort of person who was not financially involved with Wall Street profits, that his sympathy for financial markets would have been based purely on theory. It turns out such payments are common practice--given Mishkin and the Columbia professor as well.  In fact, almost every economist interviewed had earned quite a bit writing reports that justified financial markets.

My experience of human nature makes me think that if you get paid by people, you think they are nice guys.  I mean, even the $1500 the Franciscans gave me in graduate school has lead people to say I am a dupe of the Franciscans when investigating early California economic history, and given how much I appreciated $1500 at the time, maybe they have a point.  While I hope to be a disinterested analyst of Franciscan account books, I'll certainly disclose my payment in the introduction to any book I may sometime get to. And yes, I think we have a big problem in academic economics when so many people at the top are earning so much from the financial sector at a time when a plausible case can be made that the financial sector is dragging down the real sector of the economy, and fostering inequality of income to a drastic degree.

I also would have liked to see on this thread of this list more direct discussion of this idea that the economics profession has been bought off. People do not trust me when I say I'm an economist, they figure I have been bought off, too.  Our reputation as economists is in shambles, and deservedly so. What are we going to do to fix the problem?     

Marie Christine Duggan
Assoc. Prof. of Economics
Keene State College
Keene, NH 03435-3400
(603)358-2628
http://sites.keene.edu/marieduggan/

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Kates
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 9:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] "Inside Job" and code of ethics for economists

Many things disturbed me about the movie “Inside Job”  but
dishonesty amongst the economists interviewed was not one of them.
Everyone spoke from within a consistent and generally mainstream
position. Economists may differ, but it is seldom in my experience that
we do not get an honest personal assessment, and I say this even about
people I profoundly disagree with. My edited collection on Macroeconomic
Theory and its Failings contains the views of economists from every
major non-mainstream tradition. We all differ over matters of theory and
policy but I doubt many of us disguise our true beliefs in what we
write. If there is a problem in economics, it is not an ethical problem,
it is a problem related to the nature of those economic theories
themselves. 


Dr Steven Kates
School of Economics, Finance
    and Marketing
RMIT University
Level 12 / 239 Bourke Street
Melbourne Vic 3000

Phone: (03) 9925 5878
Mobile: 042 7297 529