The study of economics is conducted by a large number of people (many thousands), with (apparently, at least) diverse views. I am interested in your answers to these questions:
1. Do you believe that all economists are engaged in distributing propaganda, or just some?
2. To what end is the propaganda distributed (or maybe on whose behalf)?
3. Are other academic fields similarly concerned with distributing propaganda?
So, I'm not saying that all academia is a front for aliens.
I'm saying that the narrative produced from the status quo in economics has been, for almost all of my life, very conducive to the interests of the powerful.
Do other fields have people doing that? Of course. The petroleum industry has been able to pay for people to push their agenda. That's a thing that happens.
There are some historical, political, and material reasons for the state of economics and academia in general.
Lots of academia is literally just job training for corporations, so don't front like it's above the fray. Even genuine, and valuable, research gets prioritized over less research that isn't as valuable in the private sector. So, again, I'm not the one saying that academia has a problem. Lot's of academics have said these things.
Also, from an argumentative perspective it always seems like economics starts from something like a thought experiment and then go on to use the results of that "experiment" as a evidence in its own right.
Yes, Einstein used thought experiments, but he used known physics as the starting point. I hear economic arguments that start with a premise that isn't a settled thing like "lets assume that we are hunter gatherers on the savanna and you have some beads and I have an arrowhead." It's not based on a measurement that other people have made and agree on. It's not even based on an archaeological dig where the bones of two people were found.
I realize that isn't what actually goes into a phd thesis. Its economics used as a force of nature that bothers me. It's inevitable. Maybe I'm just calling economics the pseudo-ish stuff that I get presented as a layman. Maybe every economics school in every university has a healthy group of people who are critical of basic assumptions. I hope so.
If you are an economist and I offended you, then please accept my apology. That wasn't my intention, really.
I'm not an economist, but my understanding is that some, or even a lot, of contemporary graduate-level economics is indeed like you describe, but also that there is a lot that isn't, and that the field itself is very diverse. It seemed like you were writing off everyone because of the sins of the currently dominant strand, which felt unfair.
1. Do you believe that all economists are engaged in distributing propaganda, or just some?
2. To what end is the propaganda distributed (or maybe on whose behalf)?
3. Are other academic fields similarly concerned with distributing propaganda?