Economics discipline rejects Marx’s ideas, while Humanities depts wax Marxist extremism

Speaking at SJSU Econ dept’s David S. Saurman Provocative Lecture Series, Dr. Phillip W. Magness—of the American Institute for Economic Research—examines a strange shift in higher education. While Economics departments mostly swear off Marxist principles (thanks to their “broad real world failure” in practical application), Humanities departments frequently assign Marx’s writings. Why? Magness points to academia’s data-backed “ideological tilt” towards leftism. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

Here's some stats I’ll give you. First, Karl Marx is the second most-assigned author in U.S. academia, after the Strunk and White grammar manual. So if you think about that, so it's really first place, if you set aside the technical manual on how to write a term paper. …

Second, he is assigned at two times the average frequency of any other major thinker in the Western intellectual canon except for one, and that's Plato. …

Third feature of this: Marx is actually not commonly taught in his home discipline of Economics, which is kind of interesting. Less than 3% of syllabi where Marx is an assigned feature of the reading are in Economics departments, and most of those are History of Economic Thought classes, where he has a role, he's a part of the curriculum for a reason, but a very, very small percentage in Econ.

In other words, economics has largely rejected Marxist thought, but where is it harbored? These are all disciplines that use Marx at a higher rate or higher frequency on their syllabi than Economics: the humanities—History, English, Sociology, Philosophy, and then you get to some of the smaller humanities. It trails off from there, but all have very high Marx concentrations in comparison to some of the social sciences like Economics or even Political Science. … (1:04:42–1:06:28)

We asked the question: So why is Marx emphasized? I think it's a good indicator of an ideological tilt. (1:06:49–1:06:54)

… [T]here was a very strange pattern that emerged in the late 1990s, early 2000s, where the concentration of left and far left faculty started to rapidly increase. And the concentration of moderate faculty went on a slight decline, as did conservative faculty. (1:03:10–1:03:28)

The ideological split seems to be most pronounced in the humanities … (1:03:49–1:03:52)

Watch the whole thing here.

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Image by Marc Wathieu