Megan McArdle gives 100 University of Chicago professors a good spank

which the latter really seem to need:

This from a University that has cultivated a reputation as one of the most intellectually rigorous campuses in the country. I'm tempted to weep.

Where to start with this festival of willful misunderstanding? I was surprised to hear that Milton Friedman is reviled in "The South", since I follow the Argentinian, Venezuelan, and South African economic press closely-ish, and I've never once heard the man's name mentioned. The only country that seems aware of his existence, or that of the "Chicago Boys" is Chile, and they kind of like him.

Second, their assessment of the effects of the "neoliberal global order" is forehead slapping, head shaking, did-they-really-say that? stupid. I haven't heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise. If you put all 100 in a room with unlimited access to Lexis-Nexis and a mountain-sized peyote stash to bring their quasi-communist fantasy life into 3D technicolor, they still couldn't name a country where neoliberalism has undermined a vibrant democracy. Nor where Demon Capital has made things worse. The worst you can say for the neoliberal order is that it doesn't make things better the way we hoped it would. Any place you can name that has been deeply screwed up since global capital arrived was at least as corrupt and otherwise awful before the capital swooped in to plant garment factories in the edenic swamps of rural poverty.

Do they think that we should do analyses that doesn't pay attention to individual incentives or the role of markets in allocating goods and services? Are they under the impression that there is still a debate on this? I thought the fall of the Soviet Union had rather spectacularly demonstrated that it's hard to allocate goods and services without markets. Indeed, one wonders where all these professors get their groceries.

Or perhaps they merely think that we should design our policies without regard to market alternatives. Not even the commissars managed that; you can't even reject markets without regarding them.