The Conservative Bias in Economics

I have a new column:

Yes, Nick Kristof, There Is a Conservative Bias in Economics: Nicholas Kristof recent reignited the debate over liberal bias in academia with his claim that “universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives.” He does single out my profession, economics, as being better than most social science departments in representing conservative viewpoints: 

“Economists remain influential. I wonder if that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American mainstream.” 

But the extent to which conservative ideology is represented within the profession is much larger than a simple tally of the number of conservatives versus liberals indicates. ...

It was too long, so I cut this part:

In my 30 years of participating in the hiring of new faculty, I can’t recall a single time when the politics of the candidate came up in the discussion, or when there was resistance to the type of question the candidate’s research was addressing. The research may have been viewed as uninteresting, flawed, or otherwise unlikely to make a splash in the best journals, but all that mattered was the quality of the research and the likelihood it would help our department to get better. If an applicant is likely to publish important papers in the top journal in the field, they will be offered job. I don’t even know the politics of many of my colleagues, it’s just not something that comes up in the day-to-day work on research. And it wouldn’t be simple to characterize their views in any case as I suspect some would be liberal on social issues, but conservative with respect to economic policy.