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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

My father spent the last few years of his career running the finance department of a college. He was a free market economist, and taught finance from that perspective.

Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism. They figured they'd wipe the floor with him.

Well, they badly underestimated him. He was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of history and economics. He trounced them pretty good.

But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. Several even thanked him for explaining things in ways they hadn't heard of before. A couple told him they weren't aware there was even a case for free markets.

A far cry from today.

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Science marches along. Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.

We should be careful to conclude lessons from such anecdotes. After all, we could just as easily choose Robert Pirsig as our example academic. Pirsig was grading philosophy papers and wanted to know what made some papers better than others (in his words, which papers "had more Quality"). Eventually he was asked to debate his colleagues on the subject of Quality. While he may have won that debate, he was still ostracized by his peers and fell into a downward spiral which only ended when his personality was destroyed by electroshock therapy.

Oh, and Pirsig would have been the "leftist" here, the non-conservative. The rest of the department were classicists who knew their Plato and Aristotle back and forth, and Pirsig felt himself forced to take the path of Socrates, deliberately destroying the fruits of his career in order to save his intellectual integrity. If we say that cancel culture belongs only to one side or one group, then we are deluding ourselves.

> Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.

You seem to be confused with your history/terminology.

To address your larger point: That markets are not perfectly efficient does not buttress socialism and central planning. Far from it. The latter are much worse.

> He was a free market economist [...] Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism.

While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.

> But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. > A far cry from today.

Such intellectual discourse has been going on in academia for millennia and still does today. It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.

> While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.

They set up the debate and the topic and took the socialist side. My father was the lone academic on the free market side.

> It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.

It shouldn't be surprising. But these days, it appears to be surprising.

The idea that this debate isn't near constantly happening somewhere in a given university is a bit odd. The problem now is really in the department's that are only tangentially related to the subject of the debate - e.g. the economics departments are usually, even amongst the increasingly rare Marxists, educated well enough to argue for either side but the social sciences and humanities are often definitely overrun with leftists. As you would expect, really, but still.

I do believe that all university students should be required to take part in a debate like this - the side could arguably he random, although practically I'd let the choose. Being able to debate properly is a very useful skill - some people I've met really don't like being debated, so I don't bother, but sometimes you have to. And on top of that it has a nearly capitalistic approach to challenging your beliefs - the argument formed by (say) 50 students vs. another 50 will catch many more people on different hooks than one lecturer.

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