Do read Greg Mankiw on this topic. The list of policies favored by economists includes support free trade, oppose farm subsidies, leave oil companies and speculators alone, tax the use of energy [does he mean carbon-based energy?], raise the retirement age, invite more skilled immigrants, liberalize drug policy, and raise funds for economic research.
I don’t disagree that there is a consensus on retirement age but it was news to me to read that. My informal impression had been that many economists on the left felt this would place undue burdens on people with physically demanding jobs. And personally I would sooner subsidize hard science than economics; I don’t think we’ve earned our keep lately!
Or maybe Greg is just saying that it would win economists’ votes. Like Alex, I wonder if economists vote on a more rational basis than do other people. If I meet a French economist, I suppose that his views are more shaped by his being a Frenchman than by his being an economist. I’d like to see a poll of Canadian economists on health care reform.
too bad economists don’t opine much on budgetary policy. I’d like to hear the consensus on military spending. It would probably be to cut it down. However, I’m not too sure that reasoning would be based on uniform economic principle like most of the things on Mankiw’s list.
Is there sound economics to support cutting the military that would get support from most economists?
I also wonder why economists are not in more uniform agreement based on market economic principles to lower the tax burden on about 90% of the population as well as cutting corporate tax . Is economics or ideology that causes this?
You know, I really don’t think the gas tax is as clear-and-cut as economists make it sound. If you implement a $4/gallon gas tax tomorrow, I am going to be mighty screwed if I had just bought a gas guzzling automobile today.
You might say “that’s the point!” but I don’t think people should be punished just for playing by the old rules.
I am not sure how much this applies to other taxation of externalities…
Would that be a Canadian economist’s opinion of US health care reform or Canadian health care reform? A
s a Canadian grad student in econ one of my favourite American moments is being told that universal health care is “bad, like socialism” and that it would never work without the entire country “ending up like Cuba” at a conference at a nice US university. To be fair it was an IR conference not an econ one.
On the other hand there seems to be a healthy debate over background checks for gun owners while we just dogmatically think that’s a good idea.
I’m an undergrad at a Canadian university and there is no doubt in my mind that you would see huge differences in health care opinions on both sides of the border. I took a health care economics course this year and the professor would routinely say “this is an idea that only people in the states believe.” I would like to believe these differences are caused by reasonable differences in research, not nationalism. However, there is little doubt in my mind that nationalism is the cause. More evidence that economists haven’t earned their keep lately.
Well, *this* economist thinks that IP reform would introduce a much, much larger increase in US welfare than any marginal gains from furthering opening trade. Beyond that, loosening “white collar protectionism” would also be much more beneficial than lowering the tariff on Timbuktu Cotton from 15% to 10%.
“Does anyone disagree that this policy would lead to dramatic increases in growth rates?”
Yes. I find it hard to believe that a military incapable of defeating Canada would be able to secure us.
I think economists would be much more wary of getting into wars (not necessarily defense spending generally) because of the historical association with printing money and rampant inflation.
Maybe I should say ‘should be more wary’ because I don’t recall much objection to the Iraq war from economists on inflationary grounds.
I think difference caused by research only, not by nationalism.some of the suggestion you made is good, but for economy we should do some more work.
I would like to believe these differences are caused by reasonable differences in research, not nationalism. However, there is little doubt in my mind that nationalism is the cause.
A lot of this is caused by the fact that in policy discussions in the public eye you cannot acknowledge that your position has *any* trade-offs. To do so is to then be shouted into oblivion by the other side who merely repeats that your words over and over again to the voters.
Take health care for example: the single payer system means rationed health care.
Pro: much cheaper, allows voters to feel that right to medical care (life) doesn’t hinge upon wealth, greater feeling of security when freed from fear of high medical expenses
Con: longer wait times on average, less high end health care, less innovation
Given that values tend to cluster with nationalities, it’s not surprising that Americans will tend to weigh the pros and cons and choose the American system, while Canadians can look at the same pros and cons and choose the Canadian system. However, because you can’t acknowledge the costs of whatever your choice, those advocating an American style system are obliged to pretend it wouldn’t be cheaper and provide greater access to the poor, while those advocating for a Canadian style system cannot acknowledge that the level of health care will not be the same as most Americans experience now.
Given how politics plays out, you cannot afford to acknowledge any of the cons of your preferred policy. Which means there is enormous pressure for economists studying the health care systems to either consciously or unconsciously (I suspect mostly unconsciously), shape their research to either minimize the cons or neglect to study the cons altogether. And given that economics is already a pretty ‘bendy’ subject (dealing with humans and all), it’s incredibly easy to have results come out the way you need them to come out.
So, in the end, it isn’t so much nationalism that causes divergent economic beliefs, but differing values between differing nationalities.
Furthermore, those economists who actually do “play fair” and acknowledge the cons of all positions are not going to provide data that is useful to one side or the other of a policy ‘debate’, and so will not have influence in the public debate.
Tyler, I think your statement that economists haven’t earned our keep is intellectually honest and interesting, but needs some unpacking. What should economists have done to earn our keep? What are some economists that did earn their keep?
Do you count Dean Baker as earning his keep, since he predicted the housing crisis back in 04-05?
Economist almost universally misuse mathematics, mistaking mathematical constructs for causal explanations — and don’t even get me started on all of the misuses of the logic of statistics you will almost works of economic research.
And who has paid the economists to think and work like this? Well, the biggest funder has been the Federal government. Read Mirowski’s _Machine Dreams_ for a real eye opener on this.
There’s good reason to believe that the interference of government funding in the economic “research” sector has been as destructive of economic understanding among economists as government funding has been destructive of the environment in America’s wetlands (e.g. the Army Corp of Engineers), or in a hundred other domains.
How about an army that couldn’t beat Somalia with an asymptotically infinite spending advantage?
Tom, I’ve worked for a company and for grants. I’d be hard-pressed to say which is more likely to compromise a researcher’s integrity. But, at the company, they really pushed to see whether the data was inconclusive or negative. They really really really didn’t want to kill customers. This conservatism is why I left. Not that I wanted to kill customers, but because I believed you could could cut costs AND improve quality. I proved it. Again and again and again. The conservative engineers were incredulous, as I’m sure many readers are now.
Anyway, companies don’t really do fundamental research and I’m pretty sure they’d be even more interested in the truth on that. It would be pretty embarrassing to fudge a fundamental principal. I think it’s the free-rider problem (overblown) and not private sector conflict of interest that is the main economics rationale for publically funded research.
They really really really didn’t want to kill customers. This conservatism is why I left.
I thank you. My, keyboard, which now has coffee all over it, doesn’t thank you, but I do.
More seriously, my post was mostly directed to economic research. Economic research is, I imagine, almost purely a public good, so the only reason I can think of that a company (or more likely a think tank) is going fund economic research is to justify certain policies that they would like to see enacted. Not a good situation for bias-free research in a field that already must struggle for impartiality. However, I may be lacking imagination here.
I do find it sad that economists would want government funding.
This is ridiculous. The academic study of economics is no more inherently anti-government than chemistry is.
Everyone else is rent-seeking.
Economics says nothing about values.
Economics provides us with the equations (well, we hope). It’s up to individuals (including individual economists) to decide what weight to give each factor in those equations to produce what they feel is the optimal outcome.
But humans have values. Most humans prefer health over death and most people prefer wealth over poverty.
Unfortunately, people’s values are far more nuanced than that.
Would you sacrifice yourself for your children? Does this mean you prefer death to health? Obviously not, and yet your desire for health is not unalloyed.
Likewise, there seem to be an immense number of things that many if not most humans prefer to simple increase in wealth. And for better or worse, the security of government seems to be one of them.
One data point: I work with a team of economists in many countries and of course we often pride ourselves on how our devotion to economics trumps national boundaries… except on medical care. I vividly recall a presentation some years ago in which my European colleagues and US colleagues each regarded the othr as ridiculously stupid on health care. At root, it revolved around my English colleagues insistence that consumers were completely clueless about what they were buying and that only state provision made any sense in those circumstnces… sort of a Sunstein-like opinion, with the Americans trying to figure out how this was much different from, say, buying a car. It was the clearest example I knew of in which long training as economists, and even long collaborations working together for the same clients led nonetheless to two groups of people who were unable to understand each other.
“and raise funds for economic research.”
- Sorry, no way. If they did that in Germany, we would only get more studies anouncing “all hail the state” or rather “enterprises are a stupid idea, private markets suck and workers are held in cages, electromagnetic waves from cell-phones cause cancer” and so on…
So, I’d rather subsidize sciences that are mostly apolitical, like natural sciences and engineering and which give you an edge in the technology market.
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