INTRODUCTION:
I read about the problems of Professor Hoppe, an economist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (tip to Instapundit):
Hoppe, 55, a world-renowned economist, author and speaker, said he was giving a lecture to his money and banking class in March when the incident occurred.
The subject of the lecture was economic planning for the future. Hoppe said he gave several examples to the class of about 30 upper-level undergraduate students on groups who tend to plan for the future and groups who do not.
Very young and very old people, for example, tend not to plan for the future, he said. Couples with children tend to plan more than couples without.
As in all social sciences, he said, he was speaking in generalities.
Another example he gave the class was that homosexuals tend to plan less for the future than heterosexuals.
Reasons for the phenomenon include the fact that homosexuals tend not to have children, he said. They also tend to live riskier lifestyles than heterosexuals, Hoppe said.
He said there is a belief among some economists that one of the 20th century’s most influential economists, John Maynard Keynes, was influenced in his beliefs by his homosexuality. Keynes espoused a “spend it now” philosophy to keep an economy strong, much as President Bush did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Hoppe said the portion of the lecture on homosexuals lasted perhaps 90 seconds, while the entire lecture took up his 75-minute class.
As with so many of these stories of supposed academic misconduct, one must be careful not to assume that the whole story has been told, since usually only one side is talking publicly. But if Hoppe indeed said what he says he said and no more, then I think that it is the administrators at UNLV who deserve reprimands. They should have explained to the student that such claims are clearly within academic freedom, whether true or false. I have no doubt that what Hoppe said would be offensive to some students—and indeed, he is probably wrong on the merits of most of his claims—but his claims are empirical ones. The proper response of someone who is angry with Hoppe is to gather evidence tending to show that he is wrong, and to challenge Hoppe to offer his own evidence to support his claims.
Both Eugene Volokh and I have previously contributed to debunking the apparent myth that gay males have a median of 250 sexual partners. But every representative study that I’ve seen does find substantial differences between straights and gays, so IF on average one can equate having more partners with taking higher risks, then in that very limited sense, one claim of Hoppe may be at least partly true. I have no reason to think that Hoppe is right more generally on risk-taking by gays. [But see evidence supporting Hoppe in an updated later post.]
As someone who has watched Richard Posner, Gary Becker, and others at the University of Chicago Law School Workshop, I have seen lots of generalizations about how groups act. A claim such as Hoppe made would be quite unremarkable in that classroom setting, however correct or incorrect it might be. Post-Gary Becker, it is common for economists to attribute motivations, beliefs, and behavior to people in different family or sexual situations. Some of the claims are based on assumptions of rationality, some are meant as empirical claims to be supported or rejected by evidence from the real world. I shudder to think what students at UNLV would think if Hoppe had read the claims about how gays think, act, and rationally calculate in Posner’s 1992 Sex & Reason, which spawned a lot of vigorous criticisms from both straights and gays, but no calls for academic punishment (at least that I heard). The book still has its defenders and detractors.
For example, consider this paragraph from Martha Ertman’s review of Posner’s 1992 book in the 1993 Stanford Law Review:
Posner apparently believes that lesbianism is a matter of choice rather than genetic predisposition. He recognizes that there are two contrasting viewpoints on the genesis of lesbianism: (1) it “is biologically determined”; or (2) it is “either a second-best choice by ‘mannish’ women who are unattractive to men or a political choice by angry feminists.” Although he states that given the discrimination visited on gay men and lesbians, “the idea that millions of young men and women have chosen it . . . seems preposterous,” Posner seems to prefer the choice theory regarding lesbians. He reasons that any genetic basis for “lesbian preference would have tended to be selected out” in the “evolutionary era.” Posner states that this era “apparently was characterized by a high degree of interpersonal violence, [and having] additional male protectors may well have done more for a child’s chances of survival than to have additional female protectors.” Posner also asserts that “[t]he rarity of lesbianism among animals” negates a genetic explanation of lesbianism, supporting his sociobiological theory. Therefore, assuming lesbians are made rather than born, Posner expects “opportunistic homosexuality to be more common among women than among men, at least relative to ‘real’ homosexuality.”
I can’t vouch for whether Ertman’s account of Posner’s arguments is a fully fair one, but I think you can get a feel for how easily Posner’s economic journey into sex could generate the sort of offense that the UNLV student experienced with Hoppe.
As someone who works a lot on diversity issues, where people’s backgrounds (including specifically their sexual orientation) are supposed to lead them to have different experiences and different viewpoints, I find it strange that people would rule out viewpoint differences without inquiring into the evidence. The line between a generalization and a stereotype is a fine one. The primary problem with stereotyping is in failing to treat someone who could be treated as an individual as an individual, just assuming when you have individual evidence that the person is guided by his race, gender, sexual orientation, or politics. But it should be permissible to describe average differences between groups, such as that African-Americans tend to vote for Democrats.
I have been working a bit on differences in gay views over the last year (I’m director of Northwestern’s Demography of Diversity Project). There is very little published work in the field—and it often conflicts. A recent study found no differences in reported happiness between gays and straights, while perhaps the leading study (Laumann et al.) found that gays are somewhat less happy. Would Ed Laumann, former provost and former chair of Sociology at the University of Chicago, be reprimanded if he were to present his data at UNLV? I could imagine some people being offended to hear Laumann’s claim that gays in his sample reported being less happy, though one might attribute such a feeling (if true) to discrimination. If Laumann is wrong (or if his findings are not generalizable to more recent years, as more recent data hints), collecting and analyzing additional data is the way to refute him.
Certainly, stereotypes about gays can be used against them. Peg Brinig and I have been kicking around the idea of examining the claim sometimes made in custody cases that gays are more selfish or less altruistic and thus less likely to make good parents. My preliminary exploration of the data suggests that this stereotype of gays and lesbians is probably false.
SOME DATA ON HOPPE’S HYPOTHESIS:
CONCLUSION ON DATA ANALYSIS:
There is good evidence on one GSS question about the future (GRNECON) that gays and bisexuals on average have different views from straights and celibates. Of course, one of the premises of the diversity rationale is that gays and bisexuals have different views on some issues, so this is hardly surprising. Yet the results on the GRNECON question show gays being relatively more concerned about future environmental issues (not less as the Hoppe hypothesis might suggest).
On a more relevant question about planning for the future, there are no significant results using usual scholarly standards. But if you mine the data fairly aggressively (and without a theoretical justification for doing so), there is one specification in which the data point to gays and bisexuals planning less. And the significance of that model disappears if you control for marital status, which would also fit Hoppe’s claims.
On balance, the data that I looked at suggest that there are likely systematic differences between gays and straights on average in some aspects of planning, but the nature of that difference is probably not what was hypothesized by Hoppe. In other words, there is more evidence in the data I examined that Hoppe is wrong than that he is right, but there is some evidence on general planning that he is right, though that evidence does not reach significance using usual scholarly standards for choosing models to test.
From what I have seen, the general Hoppe hypothesis is probably false, though it may be true in some particulars. If it’s true beyond the number of sexual partner differences (which are probably substantial, but not huge), the effect is almost certainly too small to explain much. But that should be decided in a scholarly setting, not one that challenges the right of an economist to put forward his economic theories in class.
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