1. There are experts who study complex systems: pilots, surgeons, civil engineers
Then there experts who often blown smoke: like economists
— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) January 9, 2017
Over the weekend, America’s leading economists gathered in Chicago for their annual AEA conference. The mood perfectly encapsulates the state of affairs of a profession that is more to blame for our current predicament than any other.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
CHICAGO—The nation’s leading economists are suffering an identity crisis as many of the institutions they helped build and causes they advanced have come in for public scorn and rejection at the ballot box.
The angst was on display this weekend at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, the profession’s largest gathering. The conference is a showcase for agenda-setting research, a giant job fair for the nation’s most promising young economists and, this year, the site of endless discussion about how to rebuild trust in the discipline.
Many academic economists have been champions of free trade and globalization, ideas under assault among rising populist movements in advanced economies around the world. The rise of President-elect Donald Trump, with his fierce rhetoric against elites, in particular, left many at this conference questioning their place in the world.
“The economic elite did many things to undermine their credibility while people’s economic fortunes were taking a turn for the worse,” said Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago. But a road map for regaining trust is elusive…
A separate survey from Marketplace-Edison Research, conducted in October, asked U.S. adults how much they trusted data about the economy that is reported by the federal government. A quarter of respondents said they “do not trust it at all” while another 19% said they somewhat distrust it.
That is difficult to comprehend at a conference like this, where 13,000 attendees assembled for more than 500 presentations, many of which are built around findings that heavily use that government data.
This year, academics are out in the cold. During the election The Wall Street Journal contacted every former member of the CEA, including those going back to President Richard Nixon. None had been tapped as an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, nor did any publicly endorse him.
The president-elect is “not particularly interested in hearing from the academic economist club,” Mr. Davis said.
That’s the best thing Trump’s got going for him.
That could leave him missing needed advice. Still, the profession may have brought this on itself, said Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia professor and Nobel winner. Anger among voters was to be expected, because globalization in particular was sold in part with broken promises.
“In many ways, economic science was more honest,” he said, referring to the fact that some would win but others could lose from free trade. “It only said that under certain conditions winners could compensate losers, not that they would.”
Naturally, they didn’t.
Moving along, it’s not just economists who are struggling with the post-November 8th environment. As Politico reports, Hillary campaign operatives are even hiding the work they did with her campaign in a attempt to get jobs:
The job market is about to get even more crowded for Washington Democrats, as thousands of Obama appointees join the hundreds of Clinton campaign staffers looking for employment.
There’s rarely been less demand for their services.
The Trump tornado is tearing up post-election planning around the Beltway. It’s not just that those 4,000 administration jobs are no longer available to Hillary for America alumni, or that failed Senate candidates like Russ Feingold and Katie McGinty won’t be able to hire their staff on the Hill. There are also the lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate government affairs offices that are pitching senior Obama aides’ resumes into the round file while scrambling to hire operatives with Republican connections.
It’s insult to injury for a generation of young operatives who are still managing their shock and grief from Hillary Clinton’s loss. And for those who want to fight to keep President Barack Obama’s legacy from being erased, there aren’t a lot of places ready to pay them to do it.
“It feels like there are just thousands of us trying to find a job, and there are no jobs,” said Mira Patel, a longtime Clinton aide who went from her Senate office to the State Department and, starting last summer, her presidential campaign.
“I have two sets of resumes,” said Kessler-Dellaccio. One highlights all her work fundraising and recruiting volunteers for Clinton. But after repeatedly seeing job postings looking for Republican connections, Kessler-Dellaccio says she “quite literally stripped out all of the Hillary stuff” out of her alternate C.V.
She added, “I have friends who even on LinkedIn have removed any Democratic Party alignment because they’re afraid if employers see too much Hillary stuff they’re not going to get a job.”
More seasoned Clinton aides had tried to warn the younger generations who’d spent their whole adulthoods under President Obama that Democratic dominance wasn’t necessarily permanent.
“Never count on a Democratic administration,” Patel recalled being told. “I was like, ‘Oh, come on, this is gonna be great.’”
Kinda sums it up, doesn’t it.
Before getting too demoralized, Clinton campaign staff can always look to the kind folks at Google to help them get back on their feet. As The Daily Caller noted:
A Google executive organized an online resume bank for outgoing White House staff and campaign staffers from the Clinton, Obama and other Democratic campaigns in order to help them find work, according to the Wall Street Journal. Laslo Bock, Google’s outgoing Chief of Human Resources is leading an effort to help Hillary For America staff and others find work after the devastating losses.
Not that this should come as a surprise when it comes to Google. The company’s executives were always unabashedly “with her.”
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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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reality sometimes gets in the way , now they will have a taste of what it has been like for the rest of peasants out here .
We have been worshipping at the altar of economic liberalism for four decades.
We have put in place a technocrat elite to ensure everyone follows the diktats of today’s economics.
Today we have “secular stagnation” aka “the new normal”.
A crisis in economics, what on earth are you talking about?
Now the unemployment rate for Team Obama and Team Hillary will be just as high as everyone else’s.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh
The US set its heart on liberal democracy and the end was already in sight, it was probably one of the stupidest ideas in the history of mankind.
The problems were there at the start but were ignored, it was always going to go wrong in exactly the way it has.
Francis Fukuyama talked of the “end of history” and “liberal democracy”.
Liberal democracy was the bringing together of two mutually exclusive ideas.
Economic liberalism – that enriches the few and impoverishes the many.
Democracy – that requires the support of the majority.
Trying to bring two mutually exclusive ideas together just doesn’t work.
The ideas of “Economic Liberalism” came from Milton Freidman and the University of Chicago. It was so radical they first tried it in a military dictatorship in Chile, it wouldn’t be compatible with democracy. It took death squads, torture and terror to keep it in place, there was an ethnic cleansing of anyone who still showed signs of any left wing thinking.
It was tried in a few other places in South America using similar techniques. It then did succeed in a democracy but only by tricking the people into thinking they were voting for something else, severe oppression was needed when they found out what they were getting.
Margaret Thatcher bought these ideas to the West and the plan to eliminate the welfare state has only recently been revealed. Things had to be done slowly in the West due to that bothersome democracy. The West has now seen enough.
It was implemented far more brutally in the developing world where Milton Freidman’s “Chicago Boys” were the henchmen of “The Washington Consensus”. The IMF and World Bank acted as enforcers insisting on neoliberal conditionalities for loans.
Global markets punished those not towing the neoliberal line and kept nations in their place. As Nelson Mandela was released from prison the South African Rand fell 10%, someone like this was going to be pushing up wage costs and would be bad for the economy.
Looking back it was a grand folly of an international elite whose greed overcame even a modicum of common sense.
Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” will take you through all the gory details.
Underlying neo-liberalism is a different economics, neoclassical economics, which is heavily biased towards the wealthy. Inequality and a lack of demand in the global economy were also guaranteed from the start.
It looks like the current-times phenomenon of job retraining is going to apply to these crap-headed “professionals”. Economists will have to abandon their now despised and now un-lucrative work for retraining in honest work skills such as plumbing, auto-repair (for the ones who have some kind of real talents), or bell-boys, janitors, and the like, for those who have a lack of decent-paying working abilities.
A big part of the problem is there is no one definition for economic development, there are hundreds. “It’s the curriculum, stupid.” It teaches pedantry, kids have no clue and all the ideas come from the top down. Not one of the economists understand the feeder system or how to create kids that think like champions. If you understood what makes greatness you would know how to solve the problems of job creation. I know more about creating greatness than the economists because of coaching at a championship level. Champions create things, jobs, businesses, inventions, an attitude, all the good stuff. If all you do is study data how would you know how to create a championship team? Focus on curriculum and you can change the world.