There has been pushback from economists who support fringe positions on this article I wrote while guest-blogging for Megan on things that economists agree on. A lot of the pushback seems to focus on the title of the piece which says “all economists” reject these ideas. That’s a fine complaint, but in the piece itself I go out of my way to not refer to all economists. Obviously within any field you will find some people supporting just about any position. I mean you see the doctors on TV selling obviously sham diet medicine, right? I may reply in depth to the criticisms more at some later point, but I don’t have time, so for now I just want to note one interesting thing. Here is Dean Baker who says he’s comfortable with three of the four things I say economists mostly agree on, but that I’m too easy on NAFTA and free trade. In contrast, here is Amity Shlaes who says I am spot on when it comes to free trade, but too hard on the gold standard. The general pattern is: yes, you are right to dismiss the other fringes, but not my fringe.
Which is fine, I don’t begrudge them wanting their fringe to be treated with more credence. But my point was specifically to point to a survey of economists that identified these positions as being rejected by a strong consensus of the profession. I’m not going to accurately marginalize these positions with one hand and then with the other hand tell readers to give them more consideration than the vast majority of economists do. These may be issues worth considering for economists or others with a detailed interest in the issues, but for laypeople who just want to know the truth these aren’t positions they should take very seriously.
11 comments
Comments feed for this article
Thursday ~ May 3rd, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Jesse Stout
If you lined up all the economists in the world head to toe, none of them would agree. You kind of have to tell that to someone live with the right delivery to make it funny…
Thursday ~ May 3rd, 2012 at 10:47 pm
teageegeepea
Shlaes has a degree in english, not economics.
Thursday ~ May 3rd, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Sprizouse
I agree with teageegeepea… lumping Dean Baker in with Amity Shlaes is ridiculous and it says more about you than it does about either of them.
To wit: An intelligent, highly-trained economist thinks I’m wrong in one respect, but some untrained nitwit thinks I’m wrong in the other. In such cases, their differing opinions offset and, therefore, I am right.
Hey Ozimek, how about addressing Baker’s valid and worthy criticism rather than doing this “middle ground” crap and lumping him in with Shlaes? That kind of attitude is what ends up dragging so much of our politics, culture and news media to the right.
Sunday ~ May 6th, 2012 at 6:06 pm
dumdedumdum
agree with Sprizouse’s agreement with teageegeepea. There’s an economics “surrey with a fringe on top” joke in here somewhere.
Thursday ~ May 3rd, 2012 at 11:18 pm
piedmonthudson
Adam – – –
You are totally missing the point that is important – the main stream in economics is working from a base of demonstrably false assumptions. Two of the biggest:
1. Macro can be described by extension from micro. A common logical exercise starts with “assume a representative agent” and goes from there. That this leads to entirely wrong stuff can be seen by plotting real experimental data for macro supply and demand curves.
2. Economic systems exist in a state of equilibrium with perturbations creating shocks that settle back into the equilibium state. The correct treatment of economic condition must be multivariate, continuously changing and characterized by first and second derivative behavior of the many variables. The true description of an economic system may never be described in a true closed analytical set of functions but we have to get a lot closer than the tattered neo-classical trash that has dominated more than half a century.
Those in the fringe may also make false assumptions. But in many cases those are different assumptions than made by the main stream. With intellectual honesty economists would put their false assumptions on the table and get the world to deal with them. Some of the brightest economists know the false assumptions well but they risk serious career damage if they acknowledge them.
Pardon the rant, but these are things that are just not talked about by most outside of their private closets.
John
Friday ~ May 4th, 2012 at 9:53 am
Alex Godofsky
Your position is necessary ‘fringe’ precisely because you are disputing the consensus! Adam’s perfectly correct to describe it as such.
Friday ~ May 4th, 2012 at 8:07 am
BSEconomist
Except for calling Amity Shlaes an economist, I don’t see anything at all contraversial that you wrote. The “bailout”/stimulus maybe could be called contraversial, but I think most of the opposition there is purely political–but there are economists trying to make the case and they are fairly well known.
Friday ~ May 4th, 2012 at 10:31 pm
John A
Karl,
A couple months ago I left a comment here about housing in the Seattle area seemingly “going critical.” News out the past couple days seems to confirm this trend. Things are starting to get hairy:
King County home prices rise with fewer houses for sale
Home prices rise 10% in Snohomish County
This next one was particularly interesting:
Reader Question: Did I Just Step Into a Shark Tank?
Saturday ~ May 5th, 2012 at 10:38 am
Jeff
I agree with Sprizouse, and several other commenters here. It’s obnoxious to put Shlaes and Baker together. In addition, did you even bother to read the arguments? Baker explicitly says that he’s not against free trade; he’s arguing first about whether NAFTA is a very good example of a prototypical free trade agreement because of all the other aspects entailed; and second whether it might be reasonable for a lot of people to oppose NAFTA since, although it did yield benefits in total, many people nonetheless lost out–a point, he notes, many of the surveyed economists mentioned as well. Moreover, he also states explicitly that if the title is not yours, and you didn’t literally mean to suggest that *all* economists think these things, then he *does not* have a problem with your column.
Sunday ~ September 14th, 2014 at 10:04 pm
photographer average salary
One method to speed machine general performance is to use a
registry scanner many computer specialists believe.
Merchants that sell through Amazon also complain that its very hard to kick the habit.
When we go to other people’s wedding or look at the pictures of their wedding we think and talk about how good the photos
are and some where do wish to get the same quality of pictures for
our own weddings also.
Tuesday ~ October 7th, 2014 at 1:48 am
aloe vera vitamin e
Wonderful blog! I found it while searching onn Yahoo News.
Do you have anyy tips on how to get listed in Yahoo News?
I’ve been trying for a while but I never seesm to get there!
Appreciate it