In stark contradiction to Bryan Caplan's thesis that we should all slowly back away from our government and let trained economists take over, a new paper by Anil Hira examines leaders from across the world and admits that "we cannot conclude that leadership training in economics leads to better economic outcomes." I chalk it up to the fifth and most deadly type of anti-market bias: Anti-economist-bias...
Update: Speaking of anti-economist bias, Matt suggests I have some. I don't! Honest! Some of my best friends are economists! Rather, I appropriate the Rick Perlstein line on conservatism and say: Economics cannot fail. It is only failed. A lot. For instance: Matt writes:
The ideas the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, and all the rest are working with are marginal, crackpot notions that are being mainstreamed through relentless message discipline. There isn't some army of orthodox neoclassical economists out there who think that returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that sound education policy requires expended tax breaks for rich people etc.
That's correct. But nor is there some army of orthodox economists out there saying that. Indeed, highly respected orthodox economists like Greg Mankiw, who knows the supply siders are peddling quackery and said so in his textbook, happily contributed his voice and legitimacy to the quackery in 2003.
Jon Chait is right that the supply siders are maniacs, but they aren't marginalized maniacs, and that's in part because that economics profession hasn't seen fit to marginalize them. Mankiw may say, in his textbooks, that they're charlatans, but when push came to shove he joined their cause, disagreeing, he says, with some of their nuttier claims, but nevertheless lending them and their claims -- which included, in the Bush administration, such ideas as "returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people," etc -- his name and credibility. And it wasn't a one-off: Mankiw is now a prominent advisor to Mitt Romney, who says discredited things like "“If you lower taxes enough, you create more growth."
Meanwhile, there's no outlet in the world that publishes as many economists -- and good ones, too, Nobel Prize winners -- as The Wall Street Journal editorial page. We know, and many of those economists know, that that editorial page is mendacious, extremist, and intellectually sloppy. But they nevertheless publish there, lending their titles and credibility to an outlet that continually promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology. This is, in large part, how supply-siderism survives. Not because economists believe it. But because the Right is very good at setting up incentives so it's good for the careers of otherwise credible individuals to seem like they're promoting it. And it's a shell game many economist happily participate in, and that grievously harms the country.
