Mainstream Economics - in The U.S.

In The U.S.

Mainstream economists are not generally separated into schools, but two major contemporary orthodox economic schools of thought are the "saltwater and freshwater schools." The saltwater schools consist of the universities and other institutions located near the east and west coast of the United States, such as Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Stanford, and Yale. Freshwater schools include the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Minnesota. They were referred to as the 'freshwater school' since Pittsburgh, Chicago, Rochester, and Minneapolis are located nearer to the Great Lakes. The Saltwater school is associated with Keynesian ideas of government intervention into the free market, while the Freshwater schools are skeptical of the benefits of the government. Mainstream economists do not, in general, identify themselves as members of a particular school; they may, however, be associated with approaches within a field such as the rational-expectations approach to macroeconomics.