BUZZ
Guess who is to blame? Trump!
The economics field needs more homosexual and gender-confused economists, but they are under assault from Donald Trump, according to two professors.
Bard College Professor Michael Martell,”a cis gay man,” wrote a book called “Queering Economics,” alongside Franklin and Marshall economist Leanne Roncolato, “a cis androsexual woman.” (Androsexual is a complicated way of saying Roncolato is attracted to men and masculinity).
Martell’s research interests include “economics of inequality, feminist economics, and economic development,” according to his faculty bio. Roncolato researches “the economics of gay and lesbian households, the gendered division of care labor, and the economic experience of NYC subway dancers,” according to her faculty bio.
The duo recently explained their argument in an essay for the Bay Area Reporter.
“Economics elevates voices of those who cultivate power through emulating natural sciences and discourages dissent and diversity; it marginalizes queer voices,” the pair wrote in an essay.
The field suffers from an elitism problem, since “nearly half of the editors at the four most influential publishing outlets in economics – those who decide what survives peer review and counts as knowledge – graduated from only two schools (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.)”
But while there are problems inside the field, it now faces a larger threat from President Trump and his limits on what type of research taxpayers will be forced to subsidize.
The two professors write:
Things won’t get better on their own and the current headwinds are strong. LGBTQ+ economists and economists committed to doing research empowering LGBTQ+ individuals are under attack. For many decades barriers to working on LGBTQ+ economics were implicit. It has been difficult to emulate the natural sciences with scarce data on queer individuals, and grant administrators have been reluctant to fund our research.
Just as these implicit barriers were lowering, the Trump administration and its allies in power are trying to silence queer research. They are defunding our few grants and erasing us from federal data. These efforts are gathering steam. New explicit barriers are emerging every day. For example, Texas Tech recently announced a ban on researching LGBTQ+ topics throughout its ranks. The time to respond is now.
Still, the economists will fight on.
“These attacks may delay the project of queering economics, but they will not derail it,” they write.
“The communities of economists committed to building a more inclusive, diverse, and useful discipline have already formed and are strong.”
