> [from a piece on Obama's microwonks]
> <http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html
> ?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a>
The author and the microwonks play the post-partisan two-step well. Pick two foils, and define yourself against them. Some routine of transcending the half-witted fray of benighted mortals is almost a prerequisite to be an academic economist.
Chris Hayes caught this act when he attended an macro 101 course at the University of Chicago a couple of years ago.
Shane
What We Learn When We Learn Economics by Christopher Hayes
http://www.chrishayes.org/articles/what-we-learn-when-we-learn-economics/
[....]
As a standard part of his first lecture in both his macro and microeconomics class, Sanderson reads a David Barry quote: "Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated the management skills of celery. Republicans would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't stop."
In the wake of Katrina and Iraq, this might seem quaint, but what Sanderson is doing makes sense. Temperamentally, it reflects his own, libertarian-inflected, "pox-on-both-their-houses" centrism, but his insistence on political equanimity is also crucial to his pedagogical success. Students are most likely to have been exposed to macroeconomic issues within the context of political debates about free trade, the size of the budget deficit, tax rates, etc. In order to assure students that they aren't just learning a set of political talking points, he must go out of his way to hammer home the fact that what he's offering is unbiased and nonpartisan: positive not normative, facts not opinion. "I don't have a dog in this fight," Sanderson tells the students. So every joke about George Bush is followed by a joke about Hillary Clinton, every shot at a Democrat quickly balanced by a shot at Republicans.
The effect, intentional or not, is that Sanderson appears to represent the exact center of the political spectrum, and that can leave students with a strange perception of just where the center lies. During a discussion of flat, progressive and regressive tax structures, a student asked about the argument against the flat tax. "What's wrong with the flat rate tax?" Sanderson replies. "Well, the bad thing was that Steve Forbes was the spokesman. It's not obvious that there's that much wrong with it. There's sort of a movement out there for a flat rate tax. Because it strikes some people: What could be fairer than that? It also doesn't distort incentives. It has a lot going for it."
It's true that there's "sort of a movement" for a flat tax, but those in favor of what would be the single most regressive redistribution of wealth in American history are not located in the political center. Far-right Republicans like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey have long pushed the idea, as have conservative think tanks like American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But politically, it's a non-starter. The basic notion of fairness that those who get more out of our economy should pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes is deeply embedded in American political culture, even during years of Republican domination. The students sitting around me, I start to fear, are going to walk out of the lecture thinking that the flat tax is a sensible, centrist idea. And as thousands of students pass through classes like Sanderson's every year, I worry that it will become a sensible, centrist idea.
Sanderson's politics aren't one-dimensional, and he certainly isn't a propagandist. But the fact remains that he has the predispositions of someone who "learned economics from Milton Friedman." First, there's a tendency to see trade-offs between equity and efficiency even where they might not exist. Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book The Conservative Nanny State, points out that policies can be both fairer and more efficient. For instance, Baker told me, "it is not clear that a flat tax is more efficient than a progressive income tax. This is entirely an empirical question. It is entirely possible that taxing middle-income workers and Bill Gates at a 25 percent rate will create more distortions than taxing middle-income workers at a 15 percent rate and Bill Gates at a 40 percent rate. ... They want liberals to say that we care about fairness and they care about efficiency. This is crap. They find ways to justify redistributing income upward and proclaim it to be efficient. The reality is it is not fair and generally not efficient either."
But when equity and efficiency trade-offs do arise, economists like Sanderson are systematically biased in favor of efficiency because that's what they are experts on. Efficiency they can measure and analyze. Fairness? That's the turf of philosophers and politicians. This tendency is most pronounced in discussions of economic growth, and how the benefits of that growth should be distributed. Sanderson paraphrases his Nobel Laureate colleague Bob Lucas, who says that "once you start to think about the benefits of high growth, it's hard to think about anything else." In other words, first worry about how best to grow the pie, then how to slice it up. Let efficiency trump equity, create wealth, and then you can use the extra wealth you've created to alleviate inequality.
This makes a certain amount of sense. But when this rhetoric comes to dominate our politics, the problem of inequality is never addressed. Now is always the time for growing, later is always the time to address concerns about equity. The result is predictable: In countries that have adopted the neoclassical policy prescriptions (including the United States), there has been an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
[....]