Economists and the theory of politics

John Kenneth Galbraith, “American Capitalism: The Theory of Countervailing Power.” (1980). There; if an economist needs a theory of politics and can’t be bothered to read anyone without a Ph.D. in Economics, they can start here. If they want to stretch their wings and read a theory of politics written by an actual political science, there are many good syllabi available… maybe Lukes and Gaventa if you are too delicate to handle your Marxism uncut

It seems that, on some level, the authors have rediscovered the Theory of the Second Best, which, if memory serves, says that if you have a market out of the ideal state achieved by meeting all the requirements of “perfect competition,” you don’t necessarily get closer to that great state by fixing only some of the departures; you can actually make the end result worse by making some things better. Here they are saying that (perhaps mediated by the political system), correcting market failure in one market within the macroeconomy can make things worse, overall, because of other failures in other markets in the marcroeconomy, that you don’t fix. Fair enough point. I wonder if anybody has tried to generalize the Theory of the Second Best (which relates to individual markets, IIRC) to macroeconomics?

It would be even nicer to see this paper having some influence on the numerous technocratic pundits who have unconsciously absorbed economists’ way of thinking about policy problems.

Since I take myself to be one of the main targets of that aside, I think this is a bit of a tricky issue from the standpoint of democratic legitimacy and transparency. Should I, as a technocratic pundit, pretend to believe that certain economically inefficient arrangements are in fact economically efficient because false public belief in their economic efficiency would bolster support for pro-union legislation that would bolster the political coalition in favor of generous Social Security benefits? I certainly support generous Social Security benefits and freely acknowledge that unions are *the* key institution fighting for them in congress.

Man, Matt, I never get particularly outraged at what you think…

What gets me ranty are people like Noah Smith. And I certainly don’t read Ezra Klein or Kevin Drum anymore for greater offenses than you’ve ever said…

If you don’t believe me…take:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/how-to-fix-americas-wealth-inequality-teach-americans-to-be-cheap/273940/

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-poor-can-and-should-save-money.html

Of course, there was his wierd rebuttal to your post about the left and wages, but anyways…
Noah Smith essentially starts from the unstated position that everyone acts under a broadly similar political and economic pressure that’s broadly utilitarian. More votes for Mr. Politician, and more rents for Mr. Banker and Mr. Industrialist so forth and on. However, politics and political economics just isn’t that simple. There are broad constituencies in most societies that favor repression of some members of their societies, even at their own cost, just because it makes them feel better about their own prospect. There are social and legal norms that allows predatory activities by entrenched interest–think of redlining, automatic higher interest rates just for being who you are, unequal access to redistribution schemes and explicit, costly efforts to deny access to public, nonexcludable goods like public security. A very big proportion of poor people are poor because other people MAKE them poor (or believe they don’t deserve protection from predation) and thinks it’s a good idea that this should be so. Yet, Noah Smith thinks that poverty can even be eased, let alone but cut material with a variety of Sunsteinian “nudges” that have no chance of working, especially if any gains are visible to non-poor people. Which is one major reason why lower class people do not participate in many financially enhancing activities if that should increase transparency.

As you can see, if you want to be an obnoxious notable, Mr. Yglesias, you’ll have to work harder at being obnoxious.

It seems pretty bizarre to ask whether one should engage in Straussian lies in response to an argument about how restricting analysis to economic factors ignores political economic dynamics that can render that analysis moot.

acknowledgment of the embeddedness of economic arrangements within political/cultural phenomena is a good place to start.

People say this stuff all the time and I genuinely don’t know what the normative takeaway is supposed to be. Suppose an argument over, say, tax structure. I (or some other “technocratic pundit”) say, “Maybe we should tax consumption rather than income” or, equivalently, “maybe we should get rid of the capital gains tax or at least maintain a strong preference for capital income.”

There are a lot of worthwhile rebuttals to this. You could argue that the models that put this out rely on assumptions you find untenable. You could do a regression that, while not proving anything causal, at least casts doubt over whether a shift toward consumption taxation improves things on the margin. You could argue that even if consumption taxation is better for growth, growth is not morally valuable, or perhaps even is morally pernicious. You could make the Straussian argument that people like taxing capital gains and it’s worth pretending it’s a good idea to harness that populist energy toward other means of soaking the rich. All of that is relevant to the argument and moves the conversation forward.

But when people reply with hand-wavey stuff about how embedded our economic relations are, I genuinely don’t know how to respond. Yeah, sure, our economic relations are embedded in societal structures. I don’t think anyone denies that. But given the societal structures we’ve got, either the theories being evaluated are right or they’re not. Their embeddedness is neither here nor there unless you have some means of effecting a Polanyian Great Transformation thorugh policy measures.

Actually, I can’t say–I’ve never been a reader of Mother Jones Online, and it’s been years since your blog went black. I just get snippets of your worst hits when cited at other places. Ezra is pretty easy though–taking Ryan way to seriously in the beginning and a general feeling that he’s been absorbed into the Washington Borg ever since his freewheelin’ days at Pandagon receded along with the hairline. I like Khimm, I suppose, and who can fail to love Brad Plumer? Ah, for the days of too many Brads…

I was young, once, and the Internets were free…

While practicable in Northern European economies (the experience of unions in relation to productivity in Southern Europe is an unhappy one), union political power plays out differently in an economy the size of the US. German unions could never get rid of cheaper, more efficiently produced foreign imports by simply banning them or applying prohibitive tariffs; in a polity the size of the US, however, unions can and have done exactly that.

Union politics, at the national level in the US, do not lead to more efficient allocative outcomes, but merely to protectionism and autarky. If an economy is large and self-sufficient enough on its own, it is also too large as a polity for union politics. Union power, but only for exporting economies.

The argument that Slate is staffed by technocrats has always been questionable

= = = But when people reply with hand-wavey stuff about how embedded our economic relations are, I genuinely don’t know how to respond. Yeah, sure, our economic relations are embedded in societal structures. I don’t think anyone denies that. But given the societal structures we’ve got, either the theories being evaluated are right or they’re not. = = =

Whilst I, in turn, am stonkered by responses such as this. In the 1930s the United States came very close to another civil war, possibly including a Communist revolution and/or fascist counter-revolution, as a result of (1) excess of greed (2) some bad luck (3) followed by horrifyingly bad economic policy which along with being incompetent was specifically designed to protect the 1%/5% of the day. We were saved from ourselves by WWII and massive stimulus. In order to fight WWII the 1%/5% needed (a) the enthusiastic cooperation of the working masses (b) the fighting strength of the working masses.

So, WWII over, the boys and girls home from overseas, many of the women back from the factory – and everyone in agreement that “this land was made for you and me”, not just for the 1%/5%. So policies are put in place, including the end to brutal suppression of unions and reasonable tax rates on the 1%/5%, to ensure that we have a society that everyone who contributes to can share in.

Naturally, just as in Mark Twain’s day the 1%/5% don’t like that, so they hire Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan, Charles Peters, Karl Rove, and the like to put the nation – and in particular its economy – back where they’d like it to be. With the results we now know: massive concentration of wealth to the 1%/5%, ongoing financial crises, refusal of any political party to regulate Wall Street, long-term middle class unemployment, dismantling of reasonable and necessary regulation of the “free market”, and huge amounts of suffering and uncertainty by anyone who doesn’t have at least $5 million in the bank. Return to the Gilded Age, except instead of Andrew Carnegie at least building productive steel mills the modern-day equivalent is Mitt Romney looting them, and no Teddy Roosevelt in sight.

But as far as you are concerned the _reason_ why the average tax rate for the top 1% was 45% in 1960 and 20% today (if that, given massively increased loopholes) isn’ t something we are allowed to discuss? It is just a given, and our only role as members of the polity it to debate with Matthew Yglesias whether setting the rate at 20% instead of 19% so those on Social Security constitutes “taking rents” and “decreasing efficiency”?

Got it.

Cranky Observer

Hi Cranky,

Yes, we got it. Nicely summarized! We got it good and hard, goddamn it.

Have a nice day,
Antti

@21

Surely. But now it’s confession time: political science is in many respects no better. The dominant strand of conflict studies starts from the assumption that conflict is, wait for it, inefficient. Therefore, there is always a negotiated settlement that both sides prefer to peace, given complete information and no dynamic consistency problems. Very faux-Coasian. Ie, the Cyprus payment should’ve just happened in 1973 and then we could have avoided the war and thus the need for recognition of the North.

Hell, Turkey’d probably be in the EU already and suffering from a debt crisis of their own.

It’s the same fallacy that Acemoglu and Robinson are (belatedly) writing against.

MY asks:

Should I, as a technocratic pundit, pretend to believe that certain economically inefficient arrangements are in fact economically efficient because false public belief in their economic efficiency would bolster support for pro-union legislation that would bolster the political coalition in favor of generous Social Security benefits?

It’s about the space of possibilities.

Maybe your first best world is one in which we organize production for maximum efficiency, and then redistribute the product afterward to satisfy equity concerns. So you write about policy in a way that advances one or both of these goals.

But now suppose, on the basis of arguments like A & R here, you decide that this isn’t how the real world works. Suppose you decide that redistribution — and policy in general — responds to power, which in turn depends in large part on the organization of production. So there aren’t two separate knobs labeled “efficiency” and “distribution”, there’s only one knob, which affects both at once.

You seem to be saying that intellectual honesty requires you to pretend that efficiency and distribution are independent, even when you know that’s not the case. Or that you have a duty to pretend that policy is made by a benevolent dictator, rather than arising from a political process composed of conflicting interests. And for some reason, you’re suggesting that acknowledging the reality of politics is the Straussian lie, while writing on the assumption of a benevolent, disinterested policy process you know doesn’t exist, is not.

It seems to me that you think it would be somehow dishonest if you were to let your positive political assessment of the political role of unions shape your writing about, say, teachers unions and education policy. But why is that? Again, maybe your first-best world is a well-funded public school system where decisions about classroom teaching are made by a centralized body of experts, without constraints imposed by the interests of incumbent teachers as represented by unions. But suppose you also recognize that without the teachers’ unions, schools will not be well-funded. Then your first-best world is unachievable. If the only actual possibilities are the second-best worlds of well-funded schools with rigid teacher protections, and poorly funded schools with classroom flexibility, and you think the former is preferable, there’s nothing dishonest about writing in support of it, even if that means talking less about the costs of union rules than you would in your first-best world.

OK, so concretely, what are you supposed to do?

I’m not saying you should distort or slant your stuff to make it more favorable to unions. Absolutely not. But there’s another set of choices you make, about what to write about, and that is always informed by politics. I’m sure there are all kinds of proposals you wholeheartedly support, but you don’t write about because they are too far outside the space of political possibilities. So this is just the same thing on a meta level. If technocracy just isn’t possible, there’s no sense in writing as if it were.

To the extent you take arguments like A & R seriously, you would have to ask, when deciding what to write about each day, both “does this story make the case for good policy” and “does it help build a political movement that can implement the policy?” I don’t see this as being any kind of tradeoff with doing good writing. I think you would only be more interesting if you looked for stories that were not only true and important, but helped build the labor movement and other kinds of countervailing power. It would give you a better standard for “does this matter,” which, again, is orthogonal to “is this true”.

@18 There’s an argument that Slate has technocrats writing for it?

Maybe ‘technocrat’ is being used in some special sense in this discussion, something that means nothing at all like ‘a person who could actually carry out technocratic tasks’.

I mean: Brad DeLong is a technocratic pundit, in the sense that he can and sometimes does work as a technocrat. Basically, his blog is one long plea for an appointment, which is sort of sad, but perfectly appropriate: he would slip into an appointment as if it were a jacuzzi. He really can do the technical work of managing economic affairs from a governmental position.

Such a thing is not possible for Yglesias. At all. He has no technical expertise of any kind. I guess he goes into detail sometimes at his blog. Is that the idea? A technocratic pundit is one who has more than the average amount of detail on his blog?

#28: “Basically, his [Brad DeLong’s] blog is one long plea for an appointment”

Not with what he has been writing recently, it isn’t. Anybody with a functioning brain won’t be invited to Wash D.C. for about another hundred years.

Faced with a trade union exercising monopoly power and raising the wages of its members, most economists would advocate removing or limiting the union’s ability to exercise this monopoly power, and this is certainly the right policy in some circumstances . . .

Observing employers exploiting monopsony power to repress wages, how many economists would advocate doing anything to strengthen the bargaining power of employees? And, how many (Greg Mankiw — I looking at you) would devote themselves, say, to often absurd rationalizations for why a minimum wage “hurts” minimum wage workers? How many would come up with rationalizations, say, against effective policies to reduce high, long-term unemployment rate? (Can we say, “recalculation”? “structural” unemployment?) How many would argue tendentiously for cutting tax rates on corporate income or capital gains?

I don’t have any trouble believing that “most economists faced with a trade union” (of which, they were not themselves, members, of course) would advocate against the union. But, it strains credibility for Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson to argue that “most economists” would be arguing against trade unions, because of their professional naïveté about politics, rather than, say, their political cynicism and personal corruption.

I think a broader example of a policy plan without a political plan is just this whole notion of trading deregulation for a more redistributive social state. Republicans are a naturally anti-regulation constituency, and the corporate money wants deregulation, so when more economically laissez-faire Democrats are willing to deregulate, it happens. Meanwhile, Republicans are a naturally anti-redistribution constituency, and the corporate money is at best apathetic and at worst resistant to redistribution, so when the same more Democrats push for more redistribution, nothing happens. That’s been a pretty consistent dynamic for a long while. PPACA is a major exception, and one I’m quite happy about, but as we know it took massive giveaways to the health insurance companies, a Herculean effort, and a unique political moment.

Secondly, there’s just the question of priorities. Take the focus on barber licensure. You can only become obsessed with barber licensing if you are living in a dreamy theoretical world. Our financial sector is a rapacious monster that destroyed our economy and has captured a vast amount of all of the wealth of the last decade, leaving terribly little for the rest of us. The median barber in the United States, meanwhile, makes something like $25k a year. I simply do not understand the human intelligence that feels the best priority is to go after the barbers rather than the bankers. It’s inexplicable.

MY: “I am asked to pretend that decency and morality are economically efficient? Heaven forfend I would sully myself by deserting my principles! No, I will courageously support evil, even at the high cost of sacrificing . . . other people!”

Capitalism is (or used to be, anyway) a progressive economic system; it introduces innovations, improves productivity. But it’ll only do it under certain conditions. One is competition, and the other one, just as important, is upward pressure on wages. If the choice is between a costly automation and using nearly free and unlimited manual labor in a third world country (or in any country, for that matter), – from capital’s point of view it’s a no-brainer. So, what exactly is this ‘efficiency’ they speak of? What’s efficient for capital, or what’s efficient for the rest of us? Because these are different things, often the opposite.

MY is actually a typocratic pundit.

Although economists most often emphasize the inefficiency of unions, A&R’s statement that “Faced with a trade union exercising monopoly power and raising the wages of its members, most economists would advocate removing or limiting the union’s ability to exercise this monopoly power” is a bit of a straw man, as economists have also looked at the benefits of collective bargaining and often support a minimum wage.

I believe that part of the problem is that economists are often asked (or are only confident) to pronounce on short-term consequences, whereas long-term consequences are important, too.

Just noticed Yglesias’ comment above. To answer: telling your readers that since the Walrasian competitive equilibrium is not an empirically good model for most any market, nor for all markets considered together, and hence that the First Welfare Theorem and all the baggage associated with it is not empirically valid does not constitute lying to your readers. In fact it would be doing them the service of informed commentary. What it would mean is giving up the social links with the libertarian movement that you seem to find very valuable, as well as the intellectual satisfaction you seem to take from “speaking uncomfortable truths” to liberals, even when they’re not actually, you know, true.

Øystein @ 44

Some economists have. And, a lot of economists have attacked them for doing so. The saga of Card and Krueger and the minimum wage illustrates the problem. And, the consequence is that Dylan Matthews (see his comment earlier in this thread) reports in the Washington Post reports that opinions of labor economists on the shape of the earth differ.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/13/four-things-to-know-about-obamas-minimum-wage-increase/

You can only become obsessed with barber licensing if you are living in a dreamy theoretical world

In my observation, it’s at least as easy to be concerned about occupational licensing because one of your friends can’t get 80% of the jobs he’d be qualified for because of a 10-year-old drug possession conviction.

@ JW 26:

The point about teachers’ unions is a really good one, and one I recall *almost* reading in an Yglesias post– to the effect that unions were “special interest groups which tended to promote more egalitarian educational outcomes” or some such.

Off topic, but since few will see it on my blog I’m taking the liberty to mention this here: Yglesias says inthis post that Norman Angell predicted in ‘The Great Illusion’ (1911) “that a general European war would be averted.”

Many people make this mistake. Angell did not predict that.

Ok, back to unions.

As a follow-up to my earlier comment – the heart of the Acemoglu/Robinson argument is this (pp3-4 of the paper):

To assist in clarifying these ideas and to organize the discussion of mechanisms in the next section, consider a two-period model. Suppose an economic policy has to be chosen in both periods and there are no economic linkages between these two periods. In addition suppose that in the Â…first period politicians have some freedom of choice over policy— — in some sense there is a “window of policy opportunity ”so that policy is not completely determined by vested interests or some political calculations. This policy choice might also be influenced by advice from economists, for example, aimed at correcting a market failure. In the second period, policies will be determined in a political equilibrium.
Let us first focus on the world of “economics without politics”, where there is no
political (as well as economic) linkage between the two periods. In such a world, the first-period policy choice can be made without any concern for the political equilibrium in the second period. However, the reality is that policy choices in the fiÂ…rst period often strengthen some groups and weaken others, and thus will likely affect the political equilibrium in the second period. In turn, the political equilibrium will determine the choices made in the second period. Therefore, the objective of the welfare maximizing policy maker, and the advice given by economists, should not just be to solve market failures today, but should take into account the later political ramifications of this Â…first period choice.

Obviously this is stylised, but I wonder – this framework assumes that period one policy is to some extent free, that is, not determined by political considerations alone. The latter-period policy is just a function of the balance of political power. But how does that difference come to be? Why is there more freedom to choose policies, independent of the “political equilibrium”, in the first period than in the second?

To put it another way, the most-discussed example here has been about unions: the weakening of unions meant there was no effective political coalition to oppose excessive deregulation and compensation in the financial sector. In this story the deregulation which occurs is something of a fait-accompli once unions are weakened — that’s just the way the balance of power comes out. But why weren’t the policy decisions which made unions weak also unavoidable in their time?

Some of the cases A&R talk about get around this problem because the stylised first-period is a disruptive one – Australia and Somalia after the discovery of natural resources; Russia after the Soviet collapse – so maybe we can figure the balance of power isn’t as well-developed, and thus isn’t determinative of policy initially (but becomes so later).

I think this plays into what I said earlier which is that it’s possible to move the unachievable first-best options into the realm of achievability: that is, the A&R ‘political equilibrium’ doesn’t exclusively determine what happens subsequently. Policy choice is always at least somewhat free, which is how the freedom which leads to do things like weakening unions arises in the first place. And if the political economy constraints aren’t totally binding then advocating for first-best solutions might have some kind of place. (Though still, as I said, probably not in the naive advocacy way which is mostly the status quo.)

like shah8 I’m baffled by Henry’s derailing of his own thread.
MY asked a rhetorical question (or call it snark if you want) to make a point. It wasn’t a terribly good point, but I have no idea how you’d not recognize what is obviously a rhetorical device and not an “insinuation”. Every 10 minutes something more offensive is posted on a CT thread. geez.

MY only ever posts once in any thread and almost never replies to comments. It is his M.O.

Being a libertarian means never having to say you’re sorry.

From what I’ve read, he seems to be just a harmless monetarist crank.

Kindred Winecoff @15:

Late in the thread, I know, but great comment— observations I heartily endorse.

But, here’s the thing: Agreed that there is no technocracy, as such, but there are hordes of wannabes (MY is one of them) who flatter themselves that they are members of one.

The harm they do to our economic and political discourse— and, to the real-world manifestations of that discourse— is considerable. That these would-be technocrats are generally taken as being of the left only makes things worse.

Harold @71:

Agreed. I have been a union activist and local officer for many years (thirty years and counting) and I can attest that, yes, the USW wants dues money, but that money, substantially, is spent the way I think it should be— for organizing, for political action, and for local service, including, especially, arbitration.

Extraction of rents— well, some high-ranking officers draw pretty decent salaries, but so what? I doubt if Leo Gerrard (sp?) comes close to the salary of the 500th ranked corporate CEO in the country.

Safety regulations, working conditions are “rent”???

And the great thing about being a libertarian is that it is all a big joke (on anyone who takes them seriously).

I guess the thread is pretty much dead, but yeah, I guess the “rents” that unions “extract” are, indeed, that difference they negotiate between rank exploitation on the one hand, and a livable wage and reasonable working conditions on the other.

Whatever.

Rich – do yourself a favor. Before you say these self-righteous, smug things, spend 2 secs. on google: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9068 “This paper develops an account of the role and significance of managerial power and rent extraction in executive compensation.” This is as mainstream econ as it gets and it’s a pretty common – probably the default view among economists. But I’m sure you prefer to live in your neat, little, epistemically closed world.

@Harold – a) no one said unions _only_ want to secure rents, but you can’t actually be denying that they’re fighting for higher wages for their members? I’d say that’s one of the main ways in which unions are important to reign in inequality. (and I, at least, would say that’s a good thing). b) whether safety regulations are “rents” in the technical sense is probably a matter of debate. If they are general, legal requirements (as they most commonly are) it probably doesn’t make much sense to think of them that way. If they’re specific to union workplaces, yes, they’re probably non-monetary rents. (and again that doesn’t make them bad in any way).

adam.smith, the flaw is that by the economists definition of ‘rent’, *everybody* wants to secure rents. It doesn’t say anything about unions that it doesn’t say about the speaker of that statement.

I think there is a difference between how things are actually discussed among economists, and how they are represented by economics popularizers. For whatever reason, the economists who are most right-wing, and thus use “rent” as a pejorative in certain circumstances, (labor unions), seem to be more influential in the political discussion that those who are not. (At least in the US).

This may be creating the confusion here.

Barry – but that was exactly the point of Kindred’s post at #15: Every economic interest groups tries to capture rents. (“The Chamber of Commerce also wants to secure rents…”). How useful the very broad category of “rents” is may be another discussion. I don’t use it in my work, but I think it’s important to understand what economists and political economists like Kindred who use economic terminology mean by it.

jb – I think that’s correct, yes. The original “rent-seeking” literature (not co-incidentally also the literature that Rodrik names in his attack on political economy) has a strong normative undercurrent, especially from its libertarian fans.

Epistemic closure is when you get hired by a magazine full of contrarians to write contrarian articles for your contrarian readers

I’m kind of torn here.

On the one hand adam.smith is clearly right when he points out that many economists do criticize CEO pay, and consider it a form of rent.

On the other hand, I have trouble believing that this is the prevailing view. My perception may be distorted however, simply because those who are critical are not likely to be widely known among the general public.

Additionally, I think it is hard to deny that many economists do have quite right-wing views, especially among the law and economics set. Certain assumptions, such as “perfect information” and “homo economicus” tend to lead to that. You also get issues, such as the funding of certain think tanks and institutions by business interests that push them in that direction.

Paul Krugman once said somewhere that because the free market works much better than you would expect for many things, it is natural for people to assume it must work well for everything, and that certain economists fall prey to that. I think that is probably true.

Look, I don’t have a survey of economists to prove this. The ones I know aren’t particularly right-wing and the right-wing ones tend to have a Luigi Zingales-type libertarianist streak that has all types of unsavory sides, but also doesn’t make them particularly sympathetic to CEOs
If you google scholar “executive compensation” and look for papers published since 2000, the list of most cited papers is dominated by Bebchuk & co-authors: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=executive+compensation&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&as_ylo=2000&as_yhi=2013
That’s not true if you do the same for “ceo pay” which is dominated by non-rent explanations:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=CEO+pay&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&as_ylo=2000&as_yhi=2013
but if you look more closely at the papers, they just claim that rents aren’t _the_ main factor. E.g. the Gabaix and Landier QJE paper says “These forces [what they refer to as “skimming”] have almost certainly been at work, and they play an important role in our understanding of the cross-section.” And even Kevin Murphy – the most ardent markets-are-always-right U Chicago economist (reluctantly) concedes that there is some rent seeking going on, although I think “CEO pay is market pay” would generally be a fair summary of his work. Most economists I know consider him a radical. And while economists are rarely far-left and more likely to be right-wing than other social scientists, the predominant view is still a left-leaning (at least in the US context) centrism. Democrats outnumber Republicans 3:1 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/21/politics
And in a survey of a pretty representative sample of superstar economists, a large plurality favors a minimum wage increase: http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_br0IEq5a9E77NMV

Point being isn’t that there is nothing to criticize about economics – I think there is plenty – but that simplistic views of the evil “economists” as exemplified here by Rich are wrong (and make you look foolish) and more importantly prevent you from learning things from economists (remember that e.g. the inequality data that gave rise to the “99%” slogan was constructed by mainstream economists).

Re: 28: “turbo 03.20.13 at 5:05 am: @18 There’s an argument that Slate has technocrats writing for it? Maybe ‘technocrat’ is being used in some special sense in this discussion, something that means nothing at all like ‘a person who could actually carry out technocratic tasks’. I mean: Brad DeLong is a technocratic pundit, in the sense that he can and sometimes does work as a technocrat. Basically, his blog is one long plea for an appointment…”

This is now my benchmark for how totally and completely wrong commenters on Crooked Timber can be…

Brad DeLong

“Point being isn’t that there is nothing to criticize about economics – I think there is plenty – but that simplistic views of the evil “economists” as exemplified here by Rich are wrong (and make you look foolish) and more importantly prevent you from learning things from economists ”

I think the problem here has to do with your imagination, not what I wrote. I never wrote anything about evil “economists”, within scare quotes or not. Here’s the comment that you disliked so much again:

“Let me guess: CEO payment packages are never “rent”, and instead are the allocation of a perfectly competitive market, because after all the CEO is bargaining individually.

Oops, I see that William Berry wrote the same thing above. Still, it’s a pretty good trick that all of management pay is optimal as opposed to those moocher unions.”

And once again — if you actually read those citations that you’re tossing around, you’ll see that the concept of rent is featured in the 2002 Bebchuk, Fried, and Walter paper, but not in most of the other abstracts that are the top hits in your Google Scholar searches. And if you look at the participant responses to the survey that you cited, you’ll see that only one of them (unless i missed one) mentions “rent” in their comments on their answers to that first question, and that the survey itself isn’t phrased using the word “rent” in the question. Why do you think this might be?

All right, I’ll answer my own question: it’s because “rent” is inherently a strained and kind of stupid concept through which to study these questions. Why did Bebchuk mention it so prominently in 2002? Because of the rent-seeking literature that equated non-rent-seeking to virtue, and which is still one of the more popularized economic views. But once that salvo had been fired, talking about CEO compensation as “rent” became increasingly more pointless, analytically, because — even more so than with workers — the marginal optimal market valuation of a CEO’s contribution to a firm is difficult to quantify.

And yes, some of my work is for left-leaning economists. No one needs to characterize economists as evil in order to make fun of a concept whose history in the public arena has been far more harmful than not.

Why on earth would anyone seek to imply that economists are evil?