Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
I am voting for Obama simply on his stance on gay marriage. He is far more supportive of LGBT rights and would most likely appoint a justice to the Surpreme Court that also supports LGBT rights.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
I just wanted to post this in case anyone was wondering when Romney's tax plan details were going to get released. I was really excited to get into the nitty gritty details of exactly what deductions and spending cuts he would get rid of to make the tax cut proposals a plausible idea:
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
The Chicago school of economics is a neoclassical school of thought within the academic community of economists, with a strong focus around the faculty of the University of Chicago, some of whom have constructed and popularized its principles.
In the context of macroeconomics, it is connected to the freshwater school of macroeconomics, in contrast to the saltwater school based in coastal universities (notably Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley). Chicago macroeconomic theory rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. The freshwater-saltwater distinction is largely antiquated today, as the two traditions have heavily incorporated ideas from each other. Specifically, New Keynesian economics was developed as a response to new classical economics, electing to incorporate the insight of rational expectations without giving up the traditional Keynesian focus on imperfect competition and sticky wages.
Chicago economists have also left their intellectual influence in other fields, notably in pioneering public choice theory and law and economics, which have led to revolutionary changes in the study of political science and law. Other economists affiliated with Chicago have made their impact in fields as diverse as social economics and economic history. Thus, there is not a clear delineation of the Chicago school of economics, a term that is more commonly used in the popular media than in academic circles. Nonetheless, Kaufman (2010) says that the School can be generally characterized by:
A deep commitment to rigorous scholarship and open academic debate, an uncompromising belief in the usefulness and insight of neoclassical price theory, and a normative position that favors and promotes economic liberalism and free markets.[1]
The University of Chicago department, considered one of the world's foremost economics departments, has fielded more Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel laureates and John Bates Clark medalists in economics than any other university.
2 Scholars
2.1 Frank Knight 2.2 Ronald Coase 2.3 George Stigler 2.4 Milton Friedman 2.5 Robert Fogel 2.6 Gary Becker 2.7 Richard Posner 2.8 Robert E. Lucas 2.9 Eugene Fama 2.10 Friedrich Hayek
The Chicago school's methodology has historically produced conclusions that favor free market policies and little government intervention (albeit within a strict, government-defined monetary regime).
No amount of political bias can possibly explain 93-4.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
The Chicago School of Economics in the way they're using it isn't an actual school...it's a school of thought.
It's a school of thought, that got it's name because people in the real and physical school (i.e. the actual Economics department at the University of Chicago today) ascribe to this school of thought.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 93% Agree 2% Uncertain 4% Disagree
Question B:
Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.
Responses weighted by each expert's confidence: 60% Agree 26% Uncertain 14% Disagree
There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.
I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio.
Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.
Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.
Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.
Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.
My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.
Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.
I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.
Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.
A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?
Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey).
Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science.
About the IGM Economic Experts Panel
To that end, our panel was chosen to include distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics, to be geographically diverse, and to include Democrats, Republicans and Independents as well as older and younger scholars. The panel members are all senior faculty at the most elite research universities in the United States. The panel includes Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark Medalists, fellows of the Econometric society, past Presidents of both the American Economics Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President's Council of Economics, and past and current editors of the leading journals in the profession. This selection process has the advantage of not only providing a set of panelists whose names will be familiar to other economists and the media, but also delivers a group with impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters.
Are you seriously accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias? This is laughable.
Also, even if there was a 3:1 Democrat:Republican ratio as the article claims, it still doesn't explain why there is such strong support for stimulus to the tune of 93-4 (23:1) and 60-14 (4:1).
And about the infamous graph. Those were projections made with the economic data available at the time. In case you forgot, virtually all official economic data like GDP, employment, etc, where overestimated, and were later revised downwards, that's why the graph was off -- the official public economic statistics which the model relied on were overestimated.
Wouldn't it be in the interest of the public to know the party affiliation of the "experts"? The fact that they won't reveal it coupled with the absurdly high ratio of supporters vs non-supporters reeks of bias.
lol
So you are accusing the Chicago School of Economics of liberal bias.
It is common knowledge that most schools have a liberal bias
The Booth Survey is not a representative survey–it’s a survey of leading economists, most of whom are sympathetic to Keynesian arguments and government intervention. So 20% aren’t. So what? That’s not evidence about the effect of the stimulus–it’s evidence about the state of economics at leading universities. If you pushed Dionne some more, he’d cite Paul Krugman. But Paul Krugman is himself a biased source. Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t win it for his work in business cycle theory. And he’s biased. His blog is called “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s not a reliable source for objective truth. He has no more evidence for stimulus than the CBO. Oh he has evidence of course. But it’s not incontrovertible. If it were, the 20% of the Booth Survey who are also fine scholars at first rate places would have to bow to that evidence. But they don’t. They have their own evidence.
Step back for a minute and consider the challenge of measuring the impact of the stimulus. It is one of many things that happened between February 2009 and the end of 2010. For starters, massive reforms of health care and the financial sector were passed. They were passed but the details of how they would actually be implemented remained uncertain through the end of 2010 (and remain so today.) There was an unprecedented set of monetary interventions. From the end of 2008 through the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet went from around $800 billion to about $2.2 trillion. And of course a million other things happened as well. The price of housing fell steadily during this period, the price of oil rose steadily, the recession officially ended and on and on and on.
No one has a model of the independent impact of these different factors or a way of measuring them accurately and reliably in a way that can be tested and confirmed or rejected. No one. That means everyone, on the left or the right, who claims to have evidence for the impact of one of them or who cherry-picks one of those out of the myriad to choose from and blames that one factor for the lousy pace of the recovery is either fooling himself or fooling you. Don’t be a fool. So when the E.J. Dionnes of the world tell you that government creates jobs, just ask them how they know. Their answer will be that someone with exemplary credentials says so. But there are those with exemplary credentials who say otherwise. Where does that leave us? It should leave us in ignorance and doubt. No certainty. No exclamation points. More humility.
The Chicago School of Economics in the way they're using it isn't an actual school...it's a school of thought.
It's a school of thought, that got it's name because people in the real and physical school (i.e. the actual Economics department at the University of Chicago today) ascribe to this school of thought.
Obviously, but that doesn't change that it's incredibly silly to respond to input by a school of thought by saying "schools have a liberal bias." I guess the school of thought of Austrian economists also has a liberal bias considering it also developed in an academic setting.
Woke up primed for tonight's debates, log on to see parallelluniverse laying down some good old fashioned facts, all is well with the world. In other news, not sure how I feel about the Hillary martyrdom bit, although her willingness to do upfront damage control for something that was not brought to her attention is admirable in any case.
On October 17 2012 01:26 farvacola wrote: Woke up primed for tonight's debates, log on to see parallelluniverse laying down some good old fashioned facts, all is well with the world. In other news, not sure how I feel about the Hillary martyrdom bit, although her willingness to do upfront damage control for something that was not brought to her attention is admirable in any case.
The only important thing I read into the Hillary situation is that Hillary has no intentions for running in 2016. She's "taking one for the team." She will not be on the 2016 ticket.
EPT![[image loading]](http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2012/07/US-unemployment-may-2011.jpg)
