Liberal Economists: Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight

Jared Bernstein has offered a muscular and cogent response to my recent take-down of his CAP paper on inequality and growth. (I called it “week-kneed.”)

I’d like to respond to his many excellent points in just two ways.

1. My critique is primarily of his rhetoric, not his reasoning. Progressives, IMO, should be shouting the manifest reality from the rooftops: progressive administrations in the U. S., over many decades and looked at every which way from Sunday, have delivered resoundingly superior economic performance by pretty much every economic measure. (Occam’s explanation: better economic policies.) By contrast, the skyrocketing wealth and income concentrations delivered by the Reagan Revolution have been accompanied by stagnation, instability, and — by many important measures — decline.

Is there incontrovertible evidence that the wealth and income concentration caused that? No. But: is there incontrovertible evidence that cutting taxes and shrinking government creates growth and prosperity? Quite the contrary. Does this prevent conservative economists from endlessly laying claim to such “manifest’ benefits? Hell no.

Liberal economists like Jared tend to be — and understandably like to see themselves as — reasonable, curious people. They like to look at the evidence and suss out what they can say definitively, then speak carefully when going beyond that. That’s understandable. But it’s also crippling to the progressive agenda. Economics and the constructs on which it is built are inescapably normative — centuries of faux-positivist theorizing notwithstanding. Conservatives pretend otherwise while unabashedly overstating their supposedly positivist case, to further their normative goals. Liberals — admirably, but unfortunately for the cause — do not respond in kind. Again: I think it’s time for liberal economists to start taking their own side in this inevitably normative argument.

2. I didn’t offer an alternative to Jared’s statistical construct because I don’t have the statistical chops. I’m an amateur. I dismissed his construct without offering an alternative — very fair point. But I did suggest the multiple-lag-based statistical methodology (Dube’s or similar) that I think professional economists should be employing. (And I showed a little amateurish example of it that I did manage to cobble together.) It requires some serious statistical skills that Jared may not have handy in his holster, but that he and his circle could easily lay hands on within his economics milieu.

Now maybe the newly launched Washington Center for Equality and Growth is currently funding exactly this kind of sophisticated analysis of the MPC/Velocity of Wealth hypothesis (a.k.a. “underconsumption”), and I just haven’t heard about it. But I am quite sure that liberal economists have not pursued that promising hypothesis with even a scintilla of the spectacular energy that conservatives have devoted to trickle-down, inequality-drives-growth arguments.

Should liberal economists be cherry-picking economic measures and analytic methods, and distorting the import of their findings, the way conservatives do? No. Should they at least be seeking out promising data and methodologies to explore (and support) the MPC argument? With only a hint of trepidation, I say yes. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

The judicious thoughtfulness that Jared displays does have rhetorical value. It gives credibility to the progressive movement that he represents. Tyler Cowen is a great example on the other side. His curious thoughtfulness on so many subjects is a remarkably effective camouflage for the Mercatus Center that he heads, even while Mercatus is broadcasting blizzards of tweets about Fox-News hobby-horses like the Export Import Bank — relatively unimportant but base-rabidizing topics that Tyler (sensibly) has little or no time for.

Liberals have the judiciousness, but not the fire-eating that the judiciousness supports.

If you want to look “reasonable” in a gunfight, bring a gun.

As usual, Steve Randy Waldman has said this all far better — and more judiciously — than I.

Cross-posted at Asymptosis.