Card ultimately stopped doing research on the minimum wage because the backlash from w/in the discipline was so intense. Yes, it's empirical. But strident ideology can play out in lots of ways. www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2006...
Like Card and Krueger basically started the "hey, maybe supply and demand under perfect competition is not the best way to think about existing labor markets" backlash and they did it with empirical studies.
Agreed (though my sense is that the younger generation of economists have largely accepted the Card & Krueger view). Economics has a dominant theoretical paradigm that aligns with the material interests of powerful people.
www.bostonreview.net/forum_respon...
"the cause of economics as a whole".... ? What could he even mean by that. To my ear it sound like a euphemism for "libertarianism as understood by some Chicago economists" and he can't bring himself to say that? What kind of a friendship is broken when you call John Cochrane a libertarian?
