Predominantly male, white, foreign and from an affluent family with an academic background – such is the profile of typical senior economics students at some of the top US universities. Politically, they tend – maybe somewhat surprisingly – to position themselves towards the left. These insights stem from two surveys conducted by economist David Colander in 1985 and 2002/03 at the universities of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Yale and Chicago.[1]

In the more recent survey, around 16% of the respondents referred to themselves as ‘conservative’, 24% as ‘moderate’ and 47% as ‘liberal’ (with ‘conservative’ here being equated with right-wing and ‘liberal’ with left-wing).

This alone, however, says little about the impact of an education in economicshttp://www.iconomix.ch/Blog. More revealing are the changes during the course of studies. Only 20% of the economics students surveyed registered a change in their political attitude. Within this segment, the shift from right to left was more pronounced than vice versa. This tendency, however, does not apply to all universities. Graduates from Chicago, for instance, tended to shift more to the right, those from Princeton more to the left.

A clearer trend became apparent when the university graduates of the 1985 survey were interviewed again about 15 years later [2]. Roughly 27% of these economists, most of whom were working in academia, saw themselves politically further to the right than they had 15 years earlier. 11%, by contrast, registered a shift to the left. Other replies revealed an increasingly sceptical attitude towards economic stimulus packages, redistribution and protectionism.

What fails to become clear, however, is the extent to which economic expertise influences such changes of heart, because none of these surveys included a control group. Age and general political trends may well have played an important role, too. Moreover, in view of the recent crisis, the scepticism of those elite academics towards government fiscal policies might since have diminished, and it obviously had little impact on policy decisions.

On behalf of the iconomix team
Michael Manz

[1] Colander, David (2005), The Making of an Economist Redux, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(1), 175–198.

[2] Colander, David (2003), The Aging of an Economist, Middlebury College Economics Discussion Paper No. 03–04.