Republicans Turn Away From Experts and Economics
Republicans Turn Away From Experts and Economics
Conservatives ignore findings that government intervention can help the economy.
By Noah Smith at Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/economics-is-another-field-where-republicans-reject-the-experts
"SNIP.....
But in the 1990s, the political tide within the profession began to turn. As grand theories were gradually replaced with humble empirical work, economists began to see that government interventions in the market like minimum wageswere often much more benign than the think tankers and pundits had predicted. The financial crisis helped dispel the idea that the government should sit back and let recessions take their course. A new crop of academic stars -- Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and others -- emerged to advance more left-leaning ideas. The economics profession overall began to warm up to the idea of an activist government, and academic concerns about inequality rose:
With this intellectual shift underway, perhaps it’s natural that Republicans would start to view pundits and pizza executives as preferable to professors. There are still high-profile academic economists who lean to the political right -- Harvard University’s Robert Barro, for example, or Stanford University’s John Taylor. A few prominent Republican policy advisers, like Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University Graduate School of Business, have solid academic credentials. But trumpeting these credentials might force Republicans to admit the equal or greater authority of the expertise among economists who advise the Democrats and urge more government intervention.
Whether that’s the case -- or whether Moore and Cain are just one more manifestation of increasing GOP hostility to academia in general -- it signifies a shift in the public role of the economics profession. The idea that economics is a conservative science is losing its grip on the public consciousness.
......SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
