the economists were more likely than the public to support the U.S. auto bailouts, by 58.6 percent to 52 percent. They were also more likely to support President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, by 52.8 percent to 43.4 percent. More economists — over 97 percent — were in favor of tax hikes, and fewer supported school-voucher programs.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
The paper to which Smith refers, by Sapienza and Zingales, is complex, so do not take either Smith’s or my word for what it says. From their conclusion:
This difference does not seem to be justified by a superior knowledge of economists, but by a different way average Americans interpret the questions. Economists answer them literally and take for granted that all the embedded assumptions are true, average Americans do not.
…Hopefully, the same economists, when they do policy advice, would answer the same questions very differently. Otherwise, we would have to conclude with William F. Buckley, Jr. that “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
As to Smith’s larger point, that economists are becoming more interventionist, I would be curious as to how much more interventionist. As long as I can remember, many economists and nearly all economic textbooks have been interventionist. Going back to 1971, whose idea was it to try to control inflation with wage-price controls?
Given the general drift to the left in academia, it would not surprise me if economists are more interventionist today than they were 30 years ago. But I would like to see some careful study to show that, not just casual empiricism.
“Economists wrong on economics, economists say” might be The Onion headline.
I am startled by how many newspaper articles quote “large groups of economists” in support of raising the minimum wage in New York State (including upstate. I live in Rochester, btw).
Someone who reads the newspaper and thinks he/she is is learning something might conclude that that raising the minimum wage in New York State (all of New York State) might be a good thing. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, or maybe we just don’t know. Probably economists are kind of neutral or indifferent or deeply divided about the issue. You would assume this, based on much journalism.
You would conclude that economists have no analytical perspective that pushes back against the notion of raising the minimum wage in a large, complex, geographically and economically (not just ethnically) diverse state.
I suspect that raising the minimum wage is not what most economists support. Maybe it’s what journalists want to think most economists think. Or perhaps journalists think it’s their job to tell the rest of us what we should support.
The journalists here seem to think we need to be told to be nice to each other. Also we should eradicate inequality, say racism is bad, follow newspaper bloggers, buy the things advertised in the paper (increasingly this means cars, real estate, restaurant meals, and craft beer / wine / spirits).
This comment meanders, but maybe I hit on something. Journalists think their job is to tell people to be nice. Their job is to stand up for the little guy–to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” to use the old quote. Some of this makes sense (preaching to the choir has its role).
Some of that rhetoric is socially obtuse and perhaps self-defeating, as it minimizes analytical perspectives of things like education, work skills, labor markets, family dynamics, personal responsibility, occupational progress over the life cycle. You could say it seeks to minimize the old, now partly abandoned distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. If someone isn’t worth $15.00 an hour, it’s the state’s job to insist that they start out at that wage. Who could be against that?
Getting back to the three axis model, the journalists seem to think about the oppressor – oppressed axis. Someone is being oppressed, they know who is doing it, and they want it to stop.
The economist’s job is to support the claim that the journalist has already assumed is correct. The journalist has to file copy on deadline.
American clerical-class economists support American clerical-class policies in the same way that Soviet economists support the Soviet system.
The filtering system of American education ensures this.
The university admission system is run by young millennial women who look for and admit people with collectivist, emotional views and actions (volunteering, causes). Many young people (especially men) select out for the trades.
The campus culture selects for more collective activism. Young people interested in a quantitative understanding of the world get engineering degrees and leave the academy, often with great bitterness at what their tuition dollars have gone towards.
Should they enter graduate education, they find that their work culture is based upon supporting trendy upper-middle-class causes. If they don’t bail out to industry with a MS, they bail out after the PhD, never to return.
I should know, I am one of those people. I’d rather do real work than talk about microagressions and safe spaces, so I left the pipeline.
The only people left in the academic system under thirty today are firmly committed primarily to social activism, safe spaces, microagressions, etc. and only interested in the study of economics to the extent that it promotes those prior goals.
And that’s why Americans want to defund the academy.
Certainly a big part, but not complete.
The philosophical worldview of economics is materialistic and egoistic. If you really believe those things, then selling your mind for profit makes sense. Everyone knows a lawyers argue things they don’t believe in to win cases. They are selling their rhetoric skills and high verbal IQ for personal profit. Why should economists be any different?
What might be confusing to people is that most of these economists probably believe this stuff, they aren’t lying intentionally. Part of this is the selection effect you noted, but part of it is an internal selection effect within ones own mind. There’s the old phrase, “you can’t get a man to understand something if understanding it hurts how he makes a living (I’m butchering the exact quote)”. Many of those lawyers come to believe their own clients side of the story, even if it seems likely false objectively. Makes it easier to argue the case.
Other then protecting someone being targeted by interventionists, what can a true free market economist do? At best, he’s always playing defense. Interventionists can come up with almost infinite schemes to make themselves rich, and that means infinite work for their paid propagandists (economists, academics, journalists, etc). If you wanted a prosperous career being an interventionist of some kind makes a lot more sense. And if you believe in materialistic egoism, having a prosperous career is certainly the point of it all, however you need to make that happen.
That’s the theory anyway. In the case of the one DC think tank economist I know it appears to be true, though in Haidt-ian fashion he’s largely oblivious to his own state of mind.
Once a month I recall Deirdre McCloskey’s quip about the economist’s viewpoint:
“No morality please, we’re economists.”
The core of the discipline, what the discipline calls “Positive Economics,” eschews morality.
The stereotypical economist is comfortable with cold-blooded analysis, seeking to describe and understand.
Rather than “No sex please, we’re British,” the discipline’s core traditional stance is “skip the morality.” Of course, if you want to bring it in later you could, but that’s not the main attraction. It’s not what we came here to do.
= – = – = – =
I wonder what percentage of journalists, or people with B.A.s, actually took a semester of micro and a semester of macro. Many people seem to have missed it or it didn’t sink in.
= – = – = – =
The problem is allied to a different issue discussed by Charles Murray (methinks in _Real education_). When he addresses an audience full of people with B.A.s, he can’t assume that most of them took a semester of statistics. The simplest verbal references to distributions or regressions or bias can’t really be made with an expectation that the audience would grasp the argument..