From Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire November 29, 2011
Quoted from an op-ed piece by Bill Keller in the New York Times: [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/opinion/keller-the-politics-of-economicsthe-politics-of-economics.html?_r=2 ]:
"There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control... So what's the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it's a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don't want to hear... But also, I've come to think something is rotten in the state of economics. The dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse."
"Economists don't live in caves, so there is no reason they should be immune to the centrifugal politics of this noisy world. Thus serious scholars are tempted to sign onto ideas that stretch their own credulity, and lesser economists are thrust forward for their moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims. Economists cluster in ideological think tanks that promote political conformity rather than intellectual rigor. Politicians, with no generally accepted consensus to challenge them, can get away with plucking data out of context to bolster assertions that are based more on faith than on reality."
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There is a problem with the above analysis: although economics are only biased about 3 to 1 in favor of the political left (which is much milder than most of the other social sciences – see diagrram below), the political tilt of economics is significant and thus the "experts" are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.
Further, as Bill Keller notes in his New York Times article, economists are not a civil to each other as they used to be in decades past.
diagram from: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/survey.htm
Quoted from an op-ed piece by Bill Keller in the New York Times: [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/opinion/keller-the-politics-of-economicsthe-politics-of-economics.html?_r=2 ]:
"There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control... So what's the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it's a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don't want to hear... But also, I've come to think something is rotten in the state of economics. The dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse."
"Economists don't live in caves, so there is no reason they should be immune to the centrifugal politics of this noisy world. Thus serious scholars are tempted to sign onto ideas that stretch their own credulity, and lesser economists are thrust forward for their moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims. Economists cluster in ideological think tanks that promote political conformity rather than intellectual rigor. Politicians, with no generally accepted consensus to challenge them, can get away with plucking data out of context to bolster assertions that are based more on faith than on reality."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
There is a problem with the above analysis: although economics are only biased about 3 to 1 in favor of the political left (which is much milder than most of the other social sciences – see diagrram below), the political tilt of economics is significant and thus the "experts" are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.
Further, as Bill Keller notes in his New York Times article, economists are not a civil to each other as they used to be in decades past.
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