Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, is interested in electing the candidate who will be best for the economy. But along the way he has learned the iron law of the political marketplace: there is an excess supply of political blowhards, and there are far too few unbiased experts. Even worse, it is hard to sort out just who is an expert and who is a blowhard.
But Scott had an ingenious insight: an anonymous survey of leading economists might yield an unbiased snapshot of the opinions of professional economists. He paid a survey company to survey over 500 members of the American Economic Association, and he just released the findings.
The headline: Overall, 59 percent of his respondents think Obama would be best for the economy’s long-term prospects, compared to 31 percent for McCain, while 10 percent thought there would be no difference.
Some might argue that these results aren’t too surprising, given that 48 percent of the sample are registered Democrats, compared to the 17 percent registered as Republicans. As such, it might be more interesting to focus on the independents, who chose Obama by a margin of 46 percent to 39 percent.
The most important issues? According to the economists surveyed, the top four issues are education, health care, international trade, and energy. They expect Obama will do a better job on education, health care, and energy, but they give the nod to McCain on international trade. I was surprised to see that “reducing the deficit” ranked so low on the list, but perhaps that reflects the myriad of other concerns currently on the agenda.
There’s another very nice finding in this survey: economists’ views on the candidates are not really shaped by their incomes. Hopefully this suggests that we are able to see beyond pure self interest.
You can read more from Scott Adams here or see his own interpretation here. You can also view the raw data in this PowerPoint deck.
And a personal aside: Great work, Scott! I really admire someone willing to learn what the experts have to say, even in those cases where the experts are at odds with his own beliefs. (Scott confesses that on “social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff. Money-wise, I can’t support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket.”) And I also really admire someone willing to spend his own nickel to put useful information into the public domain.
Of course, this is only useful information if you think that we economists have something useful to add.
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“They expect Obama will do a better job on education, health care, and energy, but they give the nod to McCain on international trade.”
How could someone who wants the government to control all 3 seriously be expected to be better than free market capitalism? What are those economist smoking? Somehow, I think there is still personal bias in this survey.
It’s nice to believe that when we arrive average of all professional opinions there lies a nonpartisan, substantiated truth. However, if we average what everyone in the United States would prefer to watch on television at a given moment, I’m sure the result wouldn’t be something that I’d want to watch (see ‘stuff we weren’t paid to endorse’ #1)
Although it would have been nice to get more details on which specific approaches they think would matter, it is interesting how much their view of what is most broken informs their view of which candidate would do better. That is, if they view health care as important, they would not favor McCain at all. There seem few items that have even distribution.
So, I am not sure that this would lead to being able to ask specific policies, since most policies cannot be in a vacuum.
As we likely all know now, lowering taxes for the very wealthiest and deregulating many industries (or ignoring enforcement), starting two wars means economic disaster, as we are seeing today. Hard to know if a better combination would work. McCain’s plan seems to be similar to the Bush model, but slightly more balanced tax cuts, perhaps more regulation of the financial sector (or so he now says, not what he said last year), continuation of the war in Iraq (no matter what the Iraqis or the military says), and taxes on employee health care to somehow fix the health care mess. Likewise, Obama is planning on a set of policies that mix together, such as tax cuts to the middle class, tax rise to the wealthiest, unclear on corp taxes, more regulation of multiple sectors, a health care policy (not a “pay everything” as some have claimed, but an attempt to get health care available to more people), a phased withdrawal from Iraq, and other policies – some costing more and some costing less. Both are probably fiction, in part because no president every gets exactly what they want through congress (even with same party).
In any case, the real point of this is that it does say that rather than specific policy, this is really about what you consider the most important objectives are.
Hey James A:
To answer your question, maybe the economists know that Obama does not want to “control” these areas but actually has a better plan to address these issues.
The “Trade” issue struck me as bizarre. What’s the huge problem facing us there?
Here is an interesting, although very shallow analysis of the effect of Republican and Democratic administrations on the economy. The more interesting statistics are average real change in GDP, average rate of inflation, and average rate of unemployment. The other statistics provided are worthless. This is not completely convincing, but worth considering and commenting on.
http://www.slate.com/id/2199810/
Prediction: Obama will win popular vote ; McCain will win Electoral college.
— Posted by William
Ugh. That’s what I’m afraid of.
It is interesting that Adams’ writeup focused on the “who is best for the long-term” question, in which independents favored Obama 46-39 (slide 75). When asked who they supported, independents favored Obama 60-33 (slide 18).
Why the difference? Social issues?