Kick 'em while they're young.

Also, I haven't had the pleasure of reading that Larry Summers blog, but even so, I'm willing to bet one (1) American dollar that Mankeew's "ad hominem" accusation is bogus. Also.

Mankiw is completely right. Only a coward writes under a fake name.

As for money and power having an effect in academic economics, I frankly would say that your conclusions seem exceedingly alarmist and make academic economics appear to be something straight out of Mao's China in terms of self-censorship.

I seriously do not think that whoever owns universities really cares about what kind of economic doctrine is taught in each, so long as any economic doctrine challenging the mainstream doesn't gain enough traction to topple it. How else does one explain that one of the top departments for heterodox and social justice economics in the USA is at the University of Utah? That's right, a well-known heterodox economics department in the state university of one of the reddest states in the USA. How does one explain that?

I have to side with "The Doubter's Companion."

Larry Summers: i'm sure that blog must be written by a woman. why did we ever let them in to harvard?

En Ming Hee

The post doesn't sound like Mao's China to me. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is more academic freedom at non-elite institutions even in the reddest of states. The US system is an open system, and even our elites prize that openness--but, and this is important, only within limits.

The model for control of academia used in the US comes from Britain, long before the Cold War, way back during WWI when Wilson commissioned the Inquiry, just before the CFR was created. Carroll Quigley wrote about the operation of the British model in The Anglo American Establishment, and when we started lending them money (oh so long ago) and stepping into their shoes, we adopted their imperial methods. Here, as in Britain, elite control is accomplished with a light touch, even a kind of invisible hand. With the creation of the National Security State and commencement of the Cold War, the hand remained invisible, but the touch didn't stay so light. Now it's heavier than ever, though no one recognizes the dead weight pressing down on them for what it is, because it's there with the constancy of gravity, so people mistake it for part of the natural world. It isn't.

You can go study heterodox economics at the University of Utah, and a young would-be economist blogging under his own name to attack Larry Summers would be well advised to make that choice, because he isn't going to get a highly-prized job at the Fed or at Yale or Harvard or Wharton and rise to the top of his profession, even if he's got the smarts of John Maynard Keynes, because smarts alone won't take you there.

But you're right, there's more room outside the mainstream in our society because it's an open society. It's possible to live and even flourish outside the mainstream. It just isn't possible to assume positions of sufficient power to change the course of events. Even, perhaps especially, when that change is necessary and overdue.

Let's not forget Summers' role in dismantling the last few New Deal regs, such as the Glass-Steagal act (then, Bill Clinton signed off on that as well). One doesn't have to be an ivy league economist to understand what that was about--ie freeing up securities (ie mortgages) for the speculator's casino.

Kid Obama hired the people who brought us the lending crisis

The Corporations own our Universities.

We are now in the throes of a Dark Age of Continual Funding by the Big Science ventures. Their funding will definitely "encourage" a certain line of research.

Do you think that any one will find the causes of Breast Cancer to be the use of certain products, such as herbicides and insectidicides, at UC Berkeley, when that University was given 50 million bucks by Novartis?

I would say any sane person writing a blog that espouses other than Corporate praise should use a pseudonym to protect their identity.