New treason of the anti-intellectuals
Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists. We’ve got to get out of this mindset, where somehow, elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.
The statement is noteworthy in two respects. One, it elevates mere pandering to the level of metapandering -- pandering about pandering. Charged with pandering to voters' pocketbooks, she responds by pandering to their anti-intellectualism: "economists ... elite opinion..."
Two, it illustrates the uniquely precarious position of economists, and economics, in the popular imagination. Imagine! "Well I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with doctors when it comes to decisions about medical treatment." Or: "We've got to get out of this mindset, where somehow we rely on physicists to tell us about quantum mechanics." Economics is the only profession where people who have never studied the subject, never read any of its major works, never so much as thought about it, nevertheless feel entitled to dismiss two centuries of the most rigorous intellectual spadework -- not for nothing is economics known as the queen of the social sciences -- with a wave of their hands.
The irony is that there are few subjects where it would be more important to listen to expert opinion, touching as it does so directly on immediate, bread-and-butter questions of the public interest. Yet because it is so intimately bound up in everyday matters, when it comes to economics people feel uniquely entitled to substitute their own opinions for those who actually know something about the subject.
Not that it's helped her any. Perhaps the overall impression, that she will say anything and do anything to get her hands on power, no matter how nonsensical or self-contradictory, is what did her in, in the end. "However lucky Error may be for a time, Truth keeps the bank, and wins in the long run." The man who wrote that, I need hardly add, was an economist.
5/09/2008
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Hear, here!
Everybody in every field thinks that theirs is the only one that gets that kind of treatment, but just look at all the horrible diet advice and medical conspiracy theories, or perpetual motion machine designs, and so on.
Our culture (and probably every other culture since the dawn of time) values anecdotes and percieved experience over education in general. I think it's just the way we're wired - we trust gut feelings first, and think second.
Geez, Andrew are you a blood relative to Joe Clark Or (John Crosbie?)? First you back Stephane Dion and now this? I thought you were a political commentator. Barack Obama could lose the election because he doesn't support the this tax relief. (He will probably lose for a bunch of other reasons, but this will make it a much greater defeat)
And besides, there are probably several economists who would support this kind of policy. High gas prices are causing economic pain/slowdown. Cutting taxes primes the economy and provides the most relief to those who are lower income earners.
I have a lot more respect for JM's position than HRC's. Part of the reason prices are as high as they are is because of HRC's (and other dems) stubbornness in refusing to develop ANWAR and Nuclear power and build new refineries. John McCain has supported developing them (as well as drilling off of calif and Fla). So JM's cheap oil policy is comprehensive - not political pandering - he's been promising this tax cut for some time.
Oh, and unlike doctoring there are widely divergent opinions within the economic field - Galbraith vs Freidman for example. I shudder to think what would have happened if JKG had been given a completely free hand where we would be today.
Your analogy would be better if doctors very rarely healed or cured people and generally came up with treatment practices that work great in theory, but kill people 40% of the time in practice.
Ok pandering is pandering....and people will either fall for it or not. It is politics. (I agree with Obama by the way it really doesnt do any good)
However, the egregious comment is HRCs. She was the most transparent in jumping on this after McCain annonced. And her response just doesnt ring true to herself, in other words it is clear she is pandering. For HRC, the policy wonk, to say she wont listen to economists is plain lying.
HRC has been courting "the uneducated white voter" and the insulting piece is that she plays the anti elite anti intellectual card because she thinks it will appeal. This woman believes in only one thing HRC.
Indeed.
Education is not synonymous with elitism. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but neither are they one and the same. Speaking with authority about a subject that one is an expert in does not make a person an elitist; it makes a person qualified. Personally, I prefer expertise in my policy makers. Of course, the painfully transparent irony is that Ms. Clinton is a member of precisely the “elite” she disingenuously disparages in the noble cause of vote grubbing.
Excellent post, Mr. Coyne, not in the least because it includes an accurate usage of the term meta, something I always enjoy.
;)
Don't just single out Clinton as a panderer - our current PM should understand economic theory well enough to prefer cuts in income tax over cuts in consumption tax. We know what policy he enacted in practice.
All politicians pander. The tragedy is it works.
I haven't been following this one closely; didn't I see something about a proposal to drop the tax at the pumps, and tax the gas companies' "windfall profits" instead?
So instead of a gas tax at the pumps, it would be a special corporate tax applied to the same corporations.
Which would only make people happy if they're really bad at math - which, conveniently for the politicians supporting such a plan, most people are. The price wouldn't change. The tax revenue wouldn't change. But it wouldn't be a "gas" tax anymore.
Carly Fiorina, McCain's "victory chair" said something similar on Stephanopoulos, saying that economics were arguing about recession where ordinary Americans and businesspeople like herself knew there was a recession.
Tell you what Carly, ordinary HP shareholders aren't arguing about your reign at HP. Making you his victory chair doesn't allay people's suspicion that McCain doesn't get the economy, it reinforces it.
"Economics is the only profession where people who have never studied the subject...nevertheless feel entitled to dismiss two centuries of the most rigorous intellectual spadework"
I suspect you are speaking as trained economist here rather than a journalist.
I agree with Stephen, Clinton's response was so unlike her that it was worse than meta panderinng--it was just plain lying. She's got no focus. No vision that she's sticking to. Even her campaign managers don't know who she is.
"if JKG had been given a completely free hand where we would be today."
In Manitoba.
denouncing Hillary Clinton and John McCain's proposal for a gas tax "holiday" during the summer months, reasoning -- correctly -- that the scheme would discourage conservation and widen the deficit
The deficit is not caused by governments confiscating an insufficient amount of cash from the populace. It's caused by out-of-control spending on the two rackets that governments love most: welfare and warfare.
Economists, that is those outside of the Ludwig von Mises institute, are nothing more than courtesans paid extremely well to recycle, regurgitate and invent new disguises for state plundering schemes.
"Inflation reduces unemployment"
"Price controls are necessary to restrain greedy capitalists and unions"
"Government spending stimulates growth"
"Natural disasters and war are good for the economy"
"Panics and depressions are failures of the free market"
Good observations!
It's good to have you back in this space. The font on the Maclean's site makes people go blind, your site is much better (and nicer-looking).