Statements

Statement 1:
“When we expect redistributive effects to even out in the long run, so that everyone eventually comes out ahead,
we are more likely to overlook reshufflings of income. That is a key reason why we believe that technological
progress should run its course, despite its short-run destructive effects on some. When, on the other hand, the forces
of trade repeatedly hit the same people – less educated, blue-collar workers – we may feel less sanguine about
globalization. Too many economists are tone-deaf to such distinctions. They are prone to attribute concerns about
globalization to crass protectionist motives or ignorance, even when there are genuine ethical issues at stake.”
Real Source: By Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard University and the author
of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2012).
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton University, the
2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the author of The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches
from the Dismal Science (1999).

Statement 2:
“A realistic view of intellectual monopoly [e.g. patent, copyright] is that it is a disease rather than a cure. It arises
not from a principled effort to increase innovation, but from an evil combination of medieval institutions – guilds,
royal licenses, trade restrictions – and the rent-seeking behaviour of would be monopolists seeking to fatten their
purse at the expense of public prosperity.”
Real Source: By David Levine, professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of
Against Intellectual Monopoly (2008).
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the university
of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of Rethinking Marxism (1985).

Statement 3:
“It is only in combination with particular, non-rational impulses that reason can determine what to do...”
Real Source: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), professor of economics at University of Chicago and London
School of Economics, and the 1974 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics.
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis and the
author of the book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).

Statement 4:
“The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care; they have every reason to support
cuts in Medicare and to fight any increase in taxes. They have even less reason to support health insurance for
everyone, or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country. They will oppose
any regulation of banks that restricts profits, even if it helps those who cannot cover their mortgages or protects the
public against predatory lending, deceptive advertising, or even a repetition of the financial crash.”
Real Source: By Angus Deaton, professor of economics at Princeton University, the 2015 recipient of the Nobel
Prize in Economics, and the author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013).
Altered Source Less-/non-Mainstream): By Thomas Piketty, professor of economics at the Paris School of
Economics and the author of capital in the twenty-first century (2013).

Statement 5:
“Unlike most other science and social science disciplines, economics has made little progress in closing its
gender gap over the last several decades. Given the field’s prominence in determining public policy, this is a
serious issue. Whether explicit or more subtle, intentional or not, the hurdles that women face in economics are
very real.”
Real Source: By Carmen Reinhart, Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School
and the author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2011)”
Altered Source (Non-Mainstream): By Diane Elson, British Economist and Sociologist, Professor Emerita at
the University of Essex, and the author of Male bias in the development process (1995).
Note: The pilot version of the survey which was run in Australia had a different statement in place of the one above.
Based on some useful feedback we received from participants, we decided to provide a statement that addresses
gender issues in economics. Since we already had a Smith/Marx pair (Statement 13), we decided to replace the
following quote used in our pilot version with the one provided above.
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the
rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
Real Source: Adam Smith
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): Karl Marx

Statement 6:
Economic discourse of any sort - verbal, mathematical, econometric-is rhetoric; that is, an effort to persuade. None
of these discursive forms should necessarily be privileged over the others unless it is agreed by the community of
scholars to be more compelling. Only when economists move away from the pursuit of universal knowledge of 'the
economy' and towards an acceptance of the necessity of vision and the historical and spatial contingency of
knowledge will the concern over ideological 'bias' begin to fade. Such a turn would have important implications
for economic method as well, as knowledge claims would increasingly find support, not in models of constrained
optimization, but with such techniques as case studies and historical analyses of social institutions and politics.
Increasing reliance of economics on mathematics and statistics has not freed the discipline from ideological bias,
it has simply made it easier to disregard.
Real Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By William Milberg, dean and professor of economics at the New School
for Social Research and the author of The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (1996).
Altered Source: By Ronald Coase (1910-2013), professor of economics at the University of Chicago Law School
and the 1991 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Statement 7:
“Academic economists, from their very open-mindedness, are apt to be carried off, unawares, by the bias of the
community in which they live. Economists whose social world is Wall Street are very apt to take the Wall Street
point of view, while economists at state universities situated in farming districts are apt to be partisans of the
agricultural interests".
Real Source: By Irving Fisher (1867-1947), professor of political economy at Yale University.
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), professor of economics at
Harvard University and the author of The New Industrial State (1947).

Statement 8:
“The market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other
activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services—some of which have taken people
well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when
things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions that went much beyond relying only on a profit-
maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.”
Real Source: By Amartya Sen, professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and the author of
Development as Freedom (1999).
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Michael Sandel, American political philosopher and professor of
government at Harvard University, and the author of What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
(2012).

Statement 9:
“The laws of property have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where
only a qualified property ought to exist. They have not held the balance fairly between human beings, but have
heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and
prevented all from starting fair in the race.”
Real Source: By John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), an English philosopher, political economist, and the author of On
Liberty (1859).
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), a German philosopher and the co-
author of The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Statement 10:
“Sharp increases in unemployment beyond the business cycle—one in six American men between 25 and 54 are
likely to be out of work even after the U.S. economy recovers—along with dramatic rises in the share of income
going to the top 1 and even the top .01 per cent of the population and declining social mobility do raise serious
questions about the fairness of capitalism...”
Real Source: By Larry Summers, professor of economics and president emeritus at Harvard University.
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Yanis Varoufakis, Greek economist who also served as the Greek
Minister of Finance (from January to July 2015, when he resigned), and the author of And the Weak Suffer What
They Must? Europe's crisis, America's economic future

Statement 11:
“It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods of formalizing a system of economic analysis...that
they expressly assume strict independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and authority if
this hypothesis is disallowed; ... Too large a proportion of recent mathematical economics are mere concoctions,
as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest upon, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and
interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”
Real Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Joh Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), professor of economics at
Cambridge and the author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
Altered Source: By Kenneth Arrow, professor of economics at Stanford University and the 1972 recipient of the
Nobel Prize in Economics.

Statement 12:
“From this failure to expunge the microeconomic foundations of neoclassical economics from post-Great
Depression theory arose the "microfoundations of macroeconomics" debate, which ultimately led to a model in
which the economy is viewed as a single utility-maximizing individual blessed with perfect knowledge of the
future. Fortunately, behavioral economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision of how individuals
operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for
understanding group dynamics in a complex society. [...] These approaches should replace neoclassical
microeconomics completely.”
Real Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Steve Keen, post-Keynesian professor of economics at Kingstone
University (UK) and the author of Debunking economics: the naked emperor dethroned? (2011).
Altered Source: By Paul Romer, professor of economics at the New York University and the author of The Troubles
with Macroeconomics (forthcoming in the American Economic Review).

Statement 13:
“In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that
is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But
the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man
whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the
same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding
out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion,
and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
Real Source: By Adam Smith.
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Karl Marx

Statement 14:
“For four decades, since my time as a graduate student, I have been preoccupied by the kinds of stories about the
myriad ways in which people depart from the fictional creatures that populate economic models [...]. Compared to
this fictional world of Econs, Humans do a lot of misbehaving, and that means that economic models make a lot of
bad predictions, predictions that can have much more serious consequences than upsetting a group of students.
Virtually no economists saw the financial crisis of 2007–08 coming, and worse, many thought that both the crash
and its aftermath were things that simply could not happen.”
Real Source: By Richard Thaler, professor of behavioural science and economics at University of Chicago Booth
School of Business and the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics (2015)..
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Gerd Gigerenzer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development, former professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and the author of Gut feelings: The
intelligence of the unconscious (2007).

Statement 15:
“There are powerful forces having to do with the sociology of the profession and the socialization process that tend
to push economists to think alike. Most economists start graduate school not having spent much time thinking about
social problems or having studied much else besides math and economics. The incentive and hierarchy systems
tend to reward those with the technical skills rather than interesting questions or research agendas. An in-group
versus out-group mentality develops rather early on that pits economists against other social scientists. [...]
[E]conomists tend to look down on other social scientists, as those distant, less competent cousins who may ask
interesting questions sometimes but never get the answers right. Or, if their answers are right, they are so not for
the methodologically correct reasons. Even economists who come from different intellectual traditions are typically
treated as “not real economists” or “not serious economists.”
Real Source: By Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard University and the author
of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2012)..
Altered Source (Less-/non-Mainstream): By Anwar Shaikh, professor of economics at the New School for Social
Research (New York) and the author of Capitalism: Competition, conflict, Crises (2016).