I won’t make a habit of this, but a comment on this blog about the Dilbert Survey of Economists was so well written that I am promoting it. I don’t entirely agree with the writer’s point, but I am impressed with its clarity. Clear thinking makes me happy.
From user Olivaw:
As an economist, I find a number of the reactions to this survey very curious.
First, in general what economists agree on most of all is a framework for evaluating government policy. Notions such as efficiency, equity, market failure, market equilibrium, and benefit-cost analysis are regarded as useful ways of thinking about the economy and possible policy interventions.
Second, most economists I know are not highly partisan. This is in part because most economists like most people have other interests than partisan politics. But it is also because studying economics tends to lead towards having somewhat complicated views on issues that often cross party orthodoxy. So, most Democratic economists tend to be moderate Democrats, and most Republican economists are moderate Republicans.
Third, the notion that somehow being an economist would lead you inevitably to support a certain candidate is strange. Economists in many cases might largely agree on the framework for evaluating a policy. They might even agree on the policy's effects. But how to value the disparate effects relies in many cases on subjective values, about which economics as a profession has little useful to say (try philosophy).
So, for example, for many policies economists might agree that the policy should be evaluated in terms of its effects on efficiency (the size of the economic pie) and equity (how equally the pie is distributed). In some cases, economists might even agree on the approximate size of these efficiency and equity effects. However, if the policy increases efficiency but decreases equity, or decreases efficiency but increases equity, there is NOTHING in economics that tells you what relative value you should place on efficiency vs. equity, and therefore what you should choose.
In general, I suspect the economists who favor Obama tend to have a greater relative weight on equity vs. efficiency compared to economists who favor McCain. Both groups might agree that both efficiency and equity are important, but they disagree PHILOSOPHICALLY (outside of their training as economists) on the relative importance of these two social values.
