Don’t let those switches distract you. My point is simple: it is very hard to find examples of successful fiscal stimulus driving an economic recovery. Ever. This should be a sobering fact.
Response:
But wasn’t the statement he made just kind of ridiculous?
Not only ridiculous — in context it was vicious.
I am a murderous Luddite populist, so of course I fail to understand why people like Cowen are tolerated just because they are competent professionals and fairly pleasant people.
There are lots of Godwinian examples of charming, pleasant people who were fundamentally horrible and vicious. Enough said.
As for competence, who cares? Scientific economists, who have been jerking everyone else around for god knows how long, have just now calmly decided that they don’t know what the fuck is going on. No skin off their asses, they’ll still have their jobs and their lives. An interesting problem indeed. Possibly the most interesting problem since the Great Depression. In the end it may be a good thing for the biz — economists will be more necessary than ever.
There’s an enormous body of physics consisting of definite, reliable answers to definite, consequential questions. On these questions there aren’t schools of thought or nuances of interpretation. That’s why physics sets the standard for successful sciences.
Economics just isn’t like that, and for that reason it would not be reasonable to hope that anyone, once certified, could ever be driven out of the profession because of incompetence, malpractice, malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, conflict of interest, fraud, misprision, malice aforethought, or any other goddamn thing. This is because to do so would be entirely arbitrary and unfair, because when the chips are down, economists can’t be sure they know anything. They’re nothing but ideologues and mercenary advocates, but with more math and more data.
Trollblog 
December 26, 2008 at 5:20 am
[…] https://trollblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/218 December 26th, 2008 […]
December 26, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Well, worse than ideologues, actually, because with an ideologue you know what you’re getting — if they’re going to convince anyone, it’s not going to be with their direct command of a pseudoscience.
Keep in mind that these same people are also now the front-line propagandists of choice against doing anything about global warming. They could succeed in taking the whole ecology with them, not just the economy.
December 27, 2008 at 9:04 am
There are lots of Godwinian examples of charming, pleasant people who were fundamentally horrible and vicious. Enough said.
See, I don’t even read Cowen because he’s so annoying. Whatever happens, whatever he says, he’s just going to cheat. (By which I mean, he is going to ignore known economics in favor of, well, rich people.)
Scientific economists, who have been jerking everyone else around for god knows how long, have just now calmly decided that they don’t know what the fuck is going on.
There are two kinds of not-knowing here. Not knowing what Paulson and Bernanke and so on have done so far because they are concealing the data, and not-knowing because to say they do know would be to admit they were wrong to support Greenspanism in the first place, and I suspect you will find many of them had major doubts about the whole thing in the first place. BUT, keeping up confidence in the economy and not getting fired took precedence.
They’re nothing but ideologues, but with more math and more data.
That applies to just about every field, I think. There is always and everywhere in every field a status quo with its defenders; the harder the science, the more likely the truth will prevail in the short run, but even then the short run isn’t all that short.
max
[‘Multiple universes! Quantum cats! Humanity-destroying global warming…maybe!’]
December 27, 2008 at 5:10 pm
For all the criticisms of contemporary medicine and its entanglement with biotech, I think that the medical profession has some standards. Economics apparently has almost none.
It’s the outcome of the combination of enormous worldly temptation and a science which, though difficult (as astrology also was) has proven much weaker at crunch time than its practitioners would have thought possible.
Someone recently called economics make-work for second rank mathematicians and physicists.
I think that at the root is an enormous misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the relationships between pure and applied economics, and between theory and experiment, and between theory and ideology, and science and advocacy. Economics is impure but pretends to be pure and always does evasive little bait-and-switch two steps when moving from Science to Policy.
For the record, I think that economics should be impure. It’s the pretense that causes the harm.
December 28, 2008 at 4:35 pm
What the world needs is economists who understand how this happens – if not before it happens, then at least after.
December 28, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Economics is impure but pretends to be pure and always does evasive little bait-and-switch two steps when moving from Science to Policy.
but everyone trying to create apologias for the ruling elite does that(ask Kipling, for instance). what’s grating about tyler cowen and his ilk is that they pass on economic propaganda as fact, and economic facts(where they exist) as propaganda.