I’m taking nominations for the best examples of dismal economic scientists.
While I wait for your suggestions, I’m going to offer two of my own nominations: Tyler Cowen and Paul Romer.
I am nominating Cowen because, in his argument that the economy probably needs a “reset,” he only focuses on lowering workers’ wages. First, he makes no mention of resetting corporate profits or the incomes of those at the very top, as if what they manage to capture were completely off limits. All the adjustment in the new, “grimmer future” will be born by those at the bottom. Second, he completely overlooks the mechanisms of his own economic theory: if lower rates of economic growth are the product of lower rates of growth of available workers (a key factor in the theory of secular stagnation), then the relative scarcity of workers should mean higher—not lower—wages. In other words, Cowen is determined to make sure all the costs of the new, slower-growing economy will be born by shifted onto those who can least afford it. For that reason, I nominate Cowen for the title of dismal economist.
I also want to nominate Romer, who continues to double down on his “mathiness” argument, by asserting (against all the work that has taken place in the philosophy of science in recent decades) that (a) there’s a single truth, (b) that truth can only be obtained via science, and (c) mathematical modeling is the singular method for making progress in science to obtain truth. There are so many things wrong with each of those assertions it’s hard to know where to begin. And I won’t, at least right now. Let me just say Romer deserves his nomination as one of the most dismal economists because of the extraordinary arrogance, pretentiousness, and ignorance of the following statements:
About math:. . .I’ve seen clear evidence that math can facilitate scientific progress toward the truth.
If you think that math is worthless or dangerous, I’m sure that there are people who will be happy to discuss this with you. I’m not interested. I’m busy.
About truth and science: My fundamental premise is that there is an objective notion of truth and that science can help us make progress toward truth.
If you do not accept this premise, I’m sure that there are people who would be happy to debate it with you. I’m not interested. I’m busy.
And please do not write to tell me that science is a social process or that the progress it makes toward the truth can be irregular. I know.
Me, I’m not too busy to discuss either the fundamental injustices of contemporary capitalism or the often-worthless and dangerous role mathematics, truth, and science have played and continue to play in the discipline of economics.
I’m also not too busy to post additional nominations for dismal economists.
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Excellent idea. Who could be worse than Milton Friedman with all of the Chicago School misdeeds! Now who is the best?
Hmmm, this should be fun. Where to begin? I’m sure there are many candidates, but it took about 15 seconds to come up with this, from one of the most dismal macro mouthpieces out there. Laurence Kotlikoff (muckety-muck professor at BU) once again does his thing, as he does, over and over and over, no matter how the world changes:
(CNSNews.com) — The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25.
“The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today.
“Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” he said. (See Kotlikoff—Testimony-to-Senate-Budget-Committe.pdf)
And then, of course, we can’t ignore the eminent Robert Barro of Harvard, champion of “Ricardian Equivalence” and the long-term necessity it imposes for doing horrible things right now (because we will have to, have to, do horrible things later…). From the NYT a few years ago (9/10/11) — but I’m sure he hasn’t changed his mind on anything (ever):
“Today’s priority has to be austerity, not stimulus, and it will not work to announce a new $450 billion jobs plan while promising vaguely to pay for it with fiscal restraint over the next 10 years, … Given the low level of government credibility, fiscal discipline has to start now to be taken seriously. But we have to do even more: I propose a consumption tax, an idea that offends many conservatives, and elimination of the corporate income tax, a proposal that outrages many liberals.
… as John Maynard Keynes understood in his 1936 masterwork, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (the first economics book I read), the main driver of business cycles is investment….
What drives investment? Stable expectations of a sound economic environment, including the long-run path of tax rates, regulations and so on. And employment is akin to investment in that hiring decisions take into account the long-run economic climate.
The lesson is that effective incentives for investment and employment require permanence and transparency. …
I believe that a long-term fiscal plan for the country requires six big steps.
Three of them were identified by the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission: reforming Social Security and Medicare by increasing ages of eligibility and shifting to an appropriate formula for indexing benefits to inflation; phasing out “tax expenditures” like the deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes and employer-provided health care; and lowering the marginal income-tax rates for individuals.
I would add three more: reversing the vast and unwise increase in spending that occurred under Presidents Bush and Obama; introducing a tax on consumer spending, like the value-added tax (or VAT) common in other rich countries; and abolishing federal corporate taxes and estate taxes. All three measures would be enormously difficult — many say impossible — but crises are opportune times for these important, basic reforms.”
One more, for today, at least, a favorite whipping-boy of yours (and mine), Nobelist Edward Prescott, co-originator of “real business cycle” theory, famous for his statement (in 2012, at a Barcelona conference, as the 2nd Great Depression lingered on), “The word ‘unemployment’ is not an economic term. I don’t use it.”
Another terse quote like that is hard to find quickly, but via his RBC version of the DSGE approach (with no money, no default, no financial institutions, no debt, and no classes, i.e., nothing resembling the world we live in), Prescott argues that those without jobs are simply substituting leisure for work during business cycles, implying that the government should do nothing in response. He is, in this, perhaps even more egregious than his mentor Robert Lucas, going so far as to claim that (as you, David, have previously noted) even the 25% measured unemployment during the Depression of the 1930s was a matter of optimal inter-temporal choice by workers.
Prescott managed to turn an outrageous assumption (continuous “market-clearing” — you know, we’re always in equilibrium, so why worry?) into a Nobel prize, which is really quite an achievement in the universe of dismal economics.