Apparently, The Economist magazine doesn’t think a survey of economists by Dilbert creator Scott Adams is sufficient, so they’ve done their own.
Via e-mail, The Economist contacted all the economists in the National Bureau of Economic Research (N.B.E.R.) — a sample that would include just about every top economist in the United States — and 142 economists responded (I was one of the 142, but the questions got hard halfway through and I had to choose “don’t know/no opinion” most of the rest of the way).
The results were striking.
Remarkably, only about 10 percent of these economists self-identify as Republicans. Nearly half of economists called themselves Democrats; the rest were undeclared. Since when did economists get so liberal? I clearly have been hanging around the University of Chicago too long.
The good news for my friend Austan Goolsbee, who has been a leading figure in the Obama campaign, is that 80 percent of the economists polled think Obama would pick a better economic team. Even the Republicans polled think Obama has a better grasp of economics than McCain.
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It certainly is bizarre that so many economists support tax hikes and increased government spending. One of the central issues in my Public Finance classes in school was that the probability that the government spends taxpayer money on most social programs less efficiently than the taxpayers themselves is overwhelmingly high.
I guess I would have to take the statistician’s defensive stance and say that the survey just got (un)lucky with it’s choice of economists to poll.
“Since when did economists get so liberal?” – probably after 8 years of disastrous economic, social, and foreign policies.
In spite of the hyperbole by people like Bobby G @1, the truth is that Obama is not that far from the U of Chicago model. He is not trying to take us back to tax rates of the 60s, he is simply trying to close loopholes and balance the upper range, as even Reagan agreed with. McCain, like Bush, thinks all tax cuts somehow solve every problem. If you also cut almost all Government, then that may be true (although you have to pay down the debt too). But, like Bush, his plan is to cut taxes and then run up the deficit by overspending or being unrealistic about how much he can cut (and lying to the voters about who would be affected by those cuts).
Again, like Bush, his statement is that the free market solves all problems, so just deregulate everything (he has not been saying that for 2 weeks though). The problem, as we have seen, is that the free market is too easily manipulated and it is time for the Republicans to stop acting shocked that this happens.
But, Obama is not asking for heavy handed regulation, just enough regulation and oversight to avoid these kinds of fiascos we see each time businesses get to “self-regulate”. But, the good news is that Obama’s plan does not include idiotic band-aid reporting nonsense such as SOX, which wastes time and money and is a chainsaw where a scalpel was needed.
So, I think the problem for McCain and Bobby G is that economists can actually read the plans and not just resort to the spin and “talking points” approach (lying is what we normally call this).
People who embrace facts and research tend not to be republicans.
Perhaps it is self-selection at work. Considering that only 142 economists bothered to answer the survey, the chance is many of the republican-leaning economists didn’t bother to turn it in.
After all, some 300 prominent economists openly endorsed McCain’s economic policies.
In any case, even if only 10% of all NBER members were republicans, that still means a lot of highly-qualified economists enough to staff several councils of economic advisers.
The economists are just acknowledging the reality of the two candidates tax plans: independent analysis shows that while both will increase the deficit, Obama’s will increase it far less than McCain’s.
It is fun to rail against big government and taxes but the reality is a huge part of government spending is essentially fixed. And if you are spending more than you are taking in, you need to take in more.
Last point: deficits tend to grow faster under Republican administrations.
Maybe economists realize all this.
Luckily politicians do not throw their lot in with Economists
I don’t understand why economists tend to be so liberal-leaning. Is it because you have to be a liberal to be successuful in a university or large city, which are probably the primary places an economist can find a job?
Maybe economists don’t support tax hikes and increased government spending? Perhaps that’s why they’re more Democratically inclined?
After all, economists deal in statistics, and looking at the recent Republican and Democratic administrations would lead you to believe that the Democrats are, in general, more fiscally prudent, whatever their manifestos profess.