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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The problem with the idea that there's a hiring bias in the academy that favors liberals is that there would, therefore, have to be lots of unemployed conservative professors (or post docs, or recent graduates).I think Daniel Klein's paper shows the percentage of liberals among economists is higher within academia than outside. I think the same explanation can be used: liberals like academia, conservatives prefer other sectors. It is a self-selecting process and we shouldn't expect equal proportions.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Hmmm. So, if we are going to impose some kind of political neutrality on academics,I think David Horowitz has proposed something like that, but I hope nobody here has!

how about on other professions. Anybody worried about the tendency of military officers to be Republicans (unless they belong to an ethnic minority)?The political orientation of the military can be very important. It has been a force opposing communism in latin america and islamism in the middle east (turkey and pakistan leap to mind). There has not been a coup in the United States and I think the possibility of one happening in the near future is laughable. Ron Paul will serve three Presidential terms before that. While the military does not get to push around our own citizenry much (I'm ignoring foreigners here because I'm not one), domestic law enforcement agencies do. Mencius Moldbug has claimed many of them were once "red government" like the military (especially officer corps) but have been captured by "blue government" sometime after the sixties, and that it was their efforts back then that resulted in victory for the hippies and black power but defeat for klansmen.

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