Opinion The economist who shouts the loudest

So what’s the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it’s a colossal,bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear. Partly it’s a Republican Party that,for its own cynical reasons,wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s lobbies that swarm in defence of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise,let alone sacrifice.

But also,I’ve come to think something is rotten in the state of economics. The dismal science,as Thomas Carlyle called it,has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse.

The democratisation of media has diminished the authority once held — and sometimes abused — by a few big newspapers and broadcasters. In many ways this has enriched society. The consequences have not all been happy,though. The easiest way to stand out in such a vast crowd of microbroadcasters is to be the loudest,the angriest,the most outrageous. If you want that precious traffic,you stake out a position somewhere in oh-my-God territory and proclaim it with a vengeance. Global warming is a hoax! Vaccines make you sick! Obama is a Muslim! In vanquishing the conventional wisdom,sometimes it seems we have vanquished wisdom itself.

Economists don’t live in caves,so there is no reason they should be immune to the centrifugal politics of this noisy world. Thus serious scholars are tempted to sign onto ideas that stretch their own credulity,and lesser economists are thrust forward for their moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims. Economists cluster in ideological think tanks that promote political conformity rather than intellectual rigour. Politicians,with no generally accepted consensus to challenge them,can get away with plucking data out of context to bolster assertions that are based more on faith than on reality. In the Internet age,anyone can be an expert,and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist.

The other day House Speaker John Boehner put out a list of 132 economists who signed a statement endorsing a Republican menu of spending cuts,tax cuts and deregulation. Reputable number-crunchers like Moody’s Analytics and some top-tier economists of both parties said Boehner’s statement would have little or no impact on the short-term employment problem. So who were these 132 economists? With a few exceptions they were academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges (no offence to Dakota State University),bloggers (the Calafia Beach Pundit?) and economists from devoutly libertarian think tanks.

Surely this dilution of authority contributes to our national paralysis. At the very least it befogs the discussion and fosters a pervasive cynicism.

Columbia’s Hubbard says the way to weed out the quackery is for serious economists to speak up when silly ideas get a political foothold. He’s right,but once a mainstream economist has settled comfortably into a party-line think tank or joined a candidate’s brain trust,or even enjoyed the adulation at partisan cocktail parties,a degree of self-censorship takes hold.

Until recently the public debate about economics pretty much stayed within the boundaries of accepted science. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have become conservative icons,John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson are stalwarts of the liberals,but in their lifetimes they all had a reverence for evidence.

Rereading some of the alternating,left-right weekly columns Samuelson and Friedman wrote for Newsweek in the ’70s,I’ve been struck by their shared assumptions,and by the fact that the tone was so civil. It’s not hard to imagine both men signing on to the kind of grand bargain that keeps eluding Congress now. But if they were getting started in today’s media market,they would probably be obliged to amp up the vitriol,to sound like the old Saturday Night Live news TV parody:

“Paul,you pompous ass!”

“Milt,you ignorant slut!”