, Columnist
Tribal Warfare in Economics Is a Thing of the Past
For years, Keynesian, Austrian and other schools fought for intellectual dominance. That's over.
Useful once upon a time.
Source: Hoberman collection/uig/getty imagesThis article is for subscribers only.
I still remember going to a graduate student barbecue my first month at the University of Michigan. I told a woman from another department that I was studying economics, and she asked me: “What school?” Blinking, I replied “This one. The University of Michigan.”
That wasn’t what she was asking, of course. She wanted to know which tribe of economists I belonged to -- the Chicago school, the Austrian school and so on. But to me, the question made no sense, because academic economists in this day and age are not actually divided into warring schools of thought. And it’s best that people stopped thinking about economists in those terms.