Main Street

Economists and Experts

Responding to a PhD economist who thinks bloggers and op-ed writers shouldn’t bother trying to explain what’s going on in the economy, Matt Yglesias does an excellent job explaining why we should try to explain exactly that:

But perhaps you’re a citizen of a liberal democracy who speaks English and tries to keep abreast of political controversies. Well you’ve probably heard politicians talking a lot about jobs and the economy. You’ve probably noticed that voters keep telling pollsters that jobs and the economy matter to them. Jobs and the economy may matter to you! You may have seen that political scientists have found that presidential re-election is closely linked to economic performance, and thus deduced that the fate of a whole range of national policy issues hinges on economic growth. Well then I bet you are probably interested in the fact that a wide range of credible experts (with PhDs, even) believe the world’s central banks could be doing more to boost employment.

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Completely apart from the fact that the “science” of economics is a good deal less developed than what you see in real sciences, the fact is that economic policy is economics plus politics. For example, according to Ben Bernanke, the Fed could reduce unemployment by raising its inflation target but this would be a bad idea because it runs the risk of causing inflation expectations to become un-anchored. That’s a judgment that contains some “economics” content but it’s largely a political judgment. It’s part of his job to make those judgments, but it’s the job of citizens to question them.

We don’t all have PhD’s in economics, nor should we. The world benefits by having people with different academic training thinking about the same large-scale problems from different angles and by having people be interested in more than one thing, even if that means they aren’t highly credentialed in everything they ever pay attention to. For instance, Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden’s economic policy advisor, doesn’t have formal training in economics, yet he’s held jobs at a think tank and under two presidential administrations doing economics. Clearly a PhD is not the be-all and end-all of understanding the economy.

Also, as Yglesias says, the world benefits by having citizens who question “experts” and fight to ensure that the government identifies the problems that plague working people and implements solutions that actually help working people. That is the essence of democracy.

Tags: economy