A Question I Asked a Much Shorter Version of…

A Question I Asked a Much Shorter Version of at the Berkeley “How Did Tax Reform Happen?” Symposium: I have a question for Alan Auerbach: a question hinted at in his slide that contrasted the analyses of the tax cuts from economists from those from “economists“. It was also hinted at in David Kamin’s slide the one that contrasted:

  1. the analyses of policy shops with models—including the highly unreliable Tax Foundation (yes, crowding out is a thing; no, the long run does not come in ten years)
  2. that found very small growth effects with the unmotivated and unjustified claims of the Trump administration.

There are two problems:

  1. David’s slide omitted a number of estimates of the effect that were even higher
  2. Alan’s slide omitted the fact that the most absurd estimates I saw came not from “economists” but from economists—Ph.D. economists with tenured appointments at places like Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Stanford.

We had:

  1. The claim by Stanford’s John Taylor, Mike Boskin, John Cogan, and George Schultz; Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, Princeton’s Harvey Rosen; Harvard’s Robert Barro; plus Larry Lindsey and Douglas Holtz-Eakin that the tax cuts would boost GDP by 3% in the long run and that it was possible the long run might come in as few as 10 years.

  2. The claim by 100-odd economists led by James C. Miller III, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Charles W. Calomiris, and Jagdish Bhagwati (who backtracked, saying he thought it was standard practice to sign letters that contained claims with which one did not agree) claiming not just such rapid growth but that the tax cuts would pay for themselves: “Sophisticated economic models show the macroeconomic feedback generated by the TCJA will… [be] more than enough to compensate for the static revenue loss…”

  3. Three of the nine—Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Larry Lindsay, and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia—whom Sen Susan Collins (R-ME) believes assured her that the tax cut was likely to pay for itself. (They claim that they did not say that, and are not responsible for Susan Collins’s misapprehension; NEWSFLASH: when you talk to a senator, you are responsible for what the senator hears, not for the loopholes you preserve so you can sleep better at night.)

  4. One of the nine, Robert Barro of Harvard, doubling down and saying that the long-run boost to GDP is not 3% but 7%—and Michael Boskin of Stanford then endorsing his analysis.

(Robert Barro has since cut his estimate of the effects of the law-as-written from 7% to 0.4%. See Barro and Furman (2018). Michael Boskin has not, to my knowledge, backed off of the 7% number.)

The net effect of all of these “analyses” by not “economists” but by economists of note and reputation was to put the Trump administration estimates in the middle of the distribution, rather than way far out on the fringe. And this mattered for the debate in the public sphere. It led, among other things, to this outraged cry from Binyamin Applebaum:

I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can’t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy. What does it mean to produce the signatures of 100 economists in favor of a given proposition when another 100 will sign their names to the opposite statement? How does Harvard, for example, justify granting tenure to people who purport to work in the same discipline and publicly condemn each other as charlatans? How are ordinary people, let alone members of Congress, supposed to figure out which tenured professors are the serious economists?…

I agree with Alan Auerbach that it would be wonderful if we had strong nonpartisan analytical institutions. But I want to ask Alan: What marching orders do you give us to get there? How can we get there when we see such egregious behavior not just from “economists” who serve political masters and do not know how to do analyses that get the incidence right, but from economists who know well how to do analyses that get the incidence right?


Symposium: How Did Tax Reform Happen?

Monday March 12, 2:00–3:30pm, 648 Evans Hall

In late December, less than two months after its initial introduction in Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act became law. Full of complex and controversial provisions, this major change in the U.S. tax system occurred more than three decades after the last significant change, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and followed a very different process in a starkly different political environment.

This coming Monday, the Robert D. Burch Center on Tax Policy and Public Finance will sponsor a special panel on how institutions shaped, or failed to shape, the new law of the land.

The panel will discuss:

  • Basics of the new tax law
  • What the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office [staff] actually do
  • How the Executive and Legislative branches interact
  • The role of budget rules and the minority party
  • How 2017 differed from 1986 and with what consequences

Our panel comprises three academics with direct experience in the tax policy process:

  • Edward Kleinbard, Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law, USC Gould School of Law; former Chief of Staff, U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation
  • David Kamin, Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; former Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy
  • Alan Auerbach, Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley; former Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation; current member, Panel of Economic Advisers, Congressional Budget Office
  • Moderator: Danny Yagan, Assistant Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley

Six Tax “Reform”-Related Appeals to Various People to Do Their Jobs for Their Country’s Sake—and Even, in the Long Run, Their Selves’ Sake

Economics as a Professional Vocation

Real GDP Growth Rate

Should-Read: The very sharp Binyamin Applebaum had an interesting rant yesterday: Binyamin Applebaum: @BCAppelbaum on Twitter: “I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can’t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy…

…What does it mean to produce the signatures of 100 economists in favor of a given proposition when another 100 will sign their names to the opposite statement? How does Harvard, for example, justify granting tenure to people who purport to work in the same discipline and publicly condemn each other as charlatans? How are ordinary people, let alone members of Congress, supposed to figure out which tenured professors are the serious economists?…

I would say, first, that journalists (and others) are supposed to use their eyes and their brains. They can take a look at the Nine Unprofessional Republican Economists who placed their letter in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday containing:

A conventional approach to economic modeling suggests that such an increase in the capital stock would raise the level of GDP in the long run by just over 4%. If achieved over a decade, the associated increase in the annual rate of GDP growth would be about 0.4% per year…

And note that by Wednesday they were saying:

Our letter addresses the impact of corporate tax reform on GDP; we did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result…

That degree of—four days later—”who are you going to believe: us or your lying eyes?” is a definite tell.

Similarly, they can take a look at the Hundred Unprofessional Republican Economists who placed their letter in Business Insider containing:

The enactment of a comprehensive overhaul—complete with a lower corporate tax rate—will ignite our economy with levels of growth not seen in generations… produce a GDP boost ‘by between 3 and 5 percent’…. Sophisticated economic models show the macroeconomic feedback generated by the TCJA will… [be] more than enough to compensate for the static revenue loss…

They should then ask: would a boost to GDP of 3% over 10 years—0.3% per year—generate growth “not seen in generations”? No, it would not. That claim is simply false, as a glance at the GDP growth graph immediately reveals.

They should then ask: what are the “sophisticated economic models [that] show the macroeconomic feedback generated by the TCJA will… [be] more than enough to compensate for the static revenue loss…” And, when the response is “[crickets]”, understand that there are no such models.

These tells of unprofessional behavior will inform them who to trust.

And they should go to organizations that at least have a track record of surveying a consistent group of well-regarded economists, like the IGM Panel. When only one economist on the panel—Stanford’s Darrell Duffie—says that they agree with the statement that the tax bill will make “US GDP… substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo…” you can conclude that economists claiming it letters that it will are far outside the professional consensus.

Now there is the question of where this unprofessional behavior by economists comes from, and what should be done about it.

Professional economists simply should not say on Saturday that the long run of their forecasts could come in as short a time as a decade (“if achieved over a decade, the associated increase in the annual rate of GDP growth would be about 0.4% per year…) and then the following Wednesday deny what they had said (“we did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result”). They should have not made the might-be-ten-years claim in the first place. Having made it, they should have withdrawn it—hell, they should still withdraw it: they could use the <strike>…</strike> html tag. Having made it, they should not deny that they made it.

Professional economists should not say that an 0.3%-point increase in economic growth would carry us to “levels of growth not seen in generations”. Professional economists should not say that “sophisticated economic models show the macroeconomic feedback generated by the TCJA will… [be] more than enough to compensate for the static revenue loss…” for their are no such models. They are, as one Twitter wit said and as I endorse, the equivalent of the girlfriend-who-lives-in-Canada.

In universities—and thinktanks—concern for one’s academic reputation and the good opinion of colleagues in the context of a community that places the highest value on truth-seeking, truth-telling, and high-quality debate is supposed to keep such unprofessional behavior to a minimum.

Just before he was canned from Berkeley during the Red Scare, medieval history professor Ernst Kantorowicz argued that the academic robe worn by scholars on formal occasions was a sign of this dedication to truth-seeking, truth-telling, and high-quality debate: academics had placed themselves under a geas to think hard and say what they believed to be true, and that in carrying out this geas they were responsible to “their conscience and their God”.

But what if we find that there are large numbers of university professors and thinktank fellows who fear neither God nor their consciences—and who value the support of donors and the approval of partisans more than their internal academic reputations? The process of socialization and acculturation was supposed to keep such people out of universities and thinktanks, and in law and lobbying firms where it was understood that people were simply offering arguments rather than claiming to be setting forth truths, and from which their arguments could be assessed with boatloads of salt. What if this process fails?

It is a serious problem.

I do not have an answer.

Calling out people who I judge behave unprofessionally and cross the line, so that I can no longer credit that they are trying as hard as they can to think and to tell the truth—that is one small thing I can do.

Alan Greenspan Misjudged the Risks in the Mid-2000s; Alan Greenspan Was Not a Coward

The standard explanations I have heard for Alan Greenspan’s policy of “benign neglect” toward the mid-2000s housing bubble–why he turned down the advice of Ned Gramlich and others to use his regulatory and jawboning powers against it–see Greenspan as motivated by three considerations:

  1. Least important: that he would take political heat if the Fed tried to get in the way of or even warned about willing borrowers and willing lenders contracting to buy houses and to take out and issue mortgages.

  2. Less important: a Randite belief that it was not the Federal Reserve’s business to protect rich investors from the consequences of their own imprudent folly.

  3. Of overwhelming importance: a belief that the Federal Reserve had the power and the tools to build firewalls to keep whatever disorder finance threw up from having serious consequences for the real economy of demand, production, and employment.

Back in the mid-2000s Greenspan had a strong case.

I certainly, bought it by and large. The Federal Reserve had, after all, managed to deal with the 1987 stock market crash, the 1991 S&L crash, the 1995 Mexican crash, the 1997 East Asian crisis, the 1998 dual bankruptcy of Russia and LTCM, the 2000 collapse of the dot-com bubble, and 9/11–plus assorted smaller financial disturbances. And it had dealt with them well.

Thus the interpretation of Alan Greenspan’s actions in the mid-2000s that I have always believed in is: he misjudged the risks, and unknowingly made bad calls.

Now comes Sebastian Mallaby with a different interpretation. Mallaby’s interpretation of Greenspan in the mid-2000s is: he understood the risks, but was too cowardly to do his proper job:

Sebastian Mallaby: The Doubts of Alan Greenspan:

Mr. Greenspan was not complacent about potential catastrophes lurking in balance sheets—he had worried about them for decades. Far from being ignorant of these issues, he was the man who knew….

In Jan. 2004, with house prices starting to look frothy, Mr. Greenspan repeated his warning, predicting a repeat of the tech bust. “It sounds as though we’re back in the late ’90s,” he worried to his colleagues. “The potential snap-back effects are large.” In short, Mr. Greenspan’s youthful fear of finance stayed with him throughout his Fed tenure. Long before the 2008 crisis, he had understood the lessons that were celebrated as new insights in the wake of the crash…

This seems to me to be simply wrong as an interpretation of the mid-2000s.

Here’s the context of the Greenspan quotes, from the January 28, 2004 FOMC meeting. Greenspan is building the case for removing from the FOMC post-meeting statement the phrase that it will wait a “considerable period” before it will start to raise the Fed Funds rate from its then-current level of 1%/year, and to replace that with a reference to “patience” before it will start to raise the Federal Funds rate.

Greenspan:

President Broaddus, did you have a question? Are there any other questions? If not, let me get started. I must say after listening to this roundtable discussion that I find it hard to recall a degree of buoyancy like the one that comes across today. Unless I’m mistaken, Committee members have not reported on indications of a more unequivocally benign and positive economic outlook in a number of years. It sounds as though we’re back in the late ’90s or perhaps early 2000. That, I suspect, is a reflection of what is going on in the economy. Indeed, on the basis of both the Beige Book and today’s roundtable discussion of regional developments, the data that will be forthcoming from official agencies, if my experience serves me well, are going to come in surprisingly on the upside. The outlook seems extraordinarily benign, and I’ll get to the reasons why that bothers me shortly.

Profits margins are high though they may have peaked and probably will be edging downward. At this stage the usual lag between productivity growth and its effects on real compensation is likely to result in increasing incomes and thus provide a fairly solid base for further growth in consumer spending as the impact of earlier tax cuts fades. The wealth effect, which has been a drag on spending for quite a long period of time, is now back to neutral or possibly has turned positive; and in my view, the consumer debt service burdens that one hears about from most of our private-sector colleagues are really being overstated. If we look, for example, at the debt service burden on home mortgages, we find that a very large number of homeowners have refinanced and have locked in a very low coupon rate on average. That suggests that most mortgage credit servicing payments are going to be relatively flat irrespective of what we do in the marketplace. And while we likely are looking at an increase in the consumer credit part of household indebtedness, it is mortgages, of course, that dominate the overall household sector debt.

On the business side it has already been mentioned that the financing gap has turned negative for the first time in quite a significant period, and we’re seeing the implications of an increase in cash flow on capital investment. We’re seeing it in the anecdotal information on capital appropriations and certainly in the new orders series, which are continually improving. Inventory investment has nowhere to go but up. The Institute of Supply Management reports that purchasing managers continue to view the inventories of their customers as exceptionally low. The implication is that new orders will strengthen, and we’re even hearing some discussions about a prospective pickup in commercial lending; that has not yet happened, but it would be another indication of a surge in inventory investment. The housing market is bound to soften at some point, but we’ve been saying that for quite a long period of time. In any event, it’s hard to imagine that housing activity will contribute very much in the way of strength to the expansion. Net exports will probably continue to be a small drag. Inflation clearly is stable.

I think the employment data are actually a good deal better than the latest payroll numbers suggest. If we look at the change in employment as the difference between gross hires less gross separations, the gross separation series as best we can judge is pretty much what we would expect given the GDP growth numbers that we have been looking at. Initial claims are down significantly as are job losses. What’s happening is that new hires are well below expectations in relation to economic growth, and I suspect that virtually all of that weakness is merely a mirror image of the increase in output per hour. Indeed, the question here is how much longer we can continue to get such rapid increases in output per hour. I do not deny that we may get additional quarters with 5 percent productivity growth rates, but if that goes on much longer, it will become historically unprecedented.

An economy characterized by cutting-edge technology such as in the United States does not seem capable of expanding much faster than 3 percent over the long run. Indeed, the level of intelligence is not high enough to foster appreciably faster growth over time. As I like to ask the question, why did it take so long to recognize the economic value of silicon among other things or to appreciate the desirability of reorganizing corporate structures the way businesses do now? Business firms could have done that fifty years ago, and they didn’t. The answer is that we’re just not smart enough. The reason that a lot of the emerging nations are able to sustain faster economic growth is that they are catching up. It’s not an intelligence issue. So there is something here that has to change, or we really are looking at a new trend in productivity that, as I see it, is remarkably fundamental. My impression of the employment data is that the probability of a significant upward revision in the December number or a pop in the January number is a good deal better than 50/50. And I would submit that, as of next week, we may—I say “may”—be looking at a somewhat different overall picture of the labor market.

The question that we have to ask ourselves is, What could go wrong with this extraordinary scenario, which the Board’s staff forecast extends through 2005? It involves the most extraordinary and benign economic performance that I have observed in my business lifetime. But then again all this involves a productivity world that I’ve never perceived or lived in, and it may be more real, if I may put it that way, than we imagine.

There are several developments, however, that I find worrisome. All have been mentioned in our discussion. The first is that yield spreads continue to fall. As yield spreads fall, we are in effect getting an incremental increase in risk-taking that is adding strength to the economic expansion. And when we get down to the rate levels at which everybody is reaching for yield, at some point the process stops and untoward things happen. The trouble is, we don’t know what will happen except that at these low rate levels there is a clear potential for huge declines in the prices of debt obligations such as Baa-rated or junk bonds. To put it another way, the potential snapback effects are large. We are always better off if equity premiums are moderate to slightly high or yields are moderate to slightly high because the vulnerability to substantial changes in market psychology is then obviously less. In my view we are vulnerable at this stage to fairly dramatic changes in psychology. We are undoubtedly pumping very considerable liquidity into the financial system. It is showing up in the Goldman Sachs and Citicorp indicators. We don’t see it in the money supply numbers or some other standard indicators. We’re seeing it in the asset-price structure. That structure is not yet at a point where “bubble” is the appropriate word to describe it, but asset pricing is getting to be very aggressive. I don’t know whether any of you have noticed that, while stock market prices have been rising persistently since March of last year, the rise in the last four or five weeks has been virtually straight up. That’s usually a sign that something is going to change and that the change is usually not terribly helpful.

I think we have to be wary of the possibility of a somewhat different outcome than is suggested by the model we may be looking at. The main issue here is what will happen in the event of a decline in the rate of growth in output per hour. In the context of the strength in aggregate demand that we are experiencing, we should get a big surge in employment. We should also get, as the staff forecast suggests, the first significant increases in unit labor costs. It is not price that we ought to be focusing on. It is not core PCE, although I think that’s ultimately where we’re going. The first signs of emerging trouble are likely to be in the form of increases in unit labor costs; and with profit margins currently at high levels, those increases may be absorbed for a while in weaker profit margins, which is probably not a bad forecast at this stage. But there is also a difficult question regarding what has caused the decline in inflation in recent years. It has been global and not confined to the United States, and it cannot simply be the consequence of monetary policy. I realize that a lot of people think that world monetary policy has suddenly gotten terrific and that it is the reason for the global decline in inflation. I’d love to believe that is true. I don’t believe it for four seconds. I think that what we’re looking at is, to an important extent, the consequence of a major move toward deregulation, the opening up of markets, and strong competitive forces driven in large part by technology. I don’t know how long this very significant downward pressure on prices is going to last. With regard to deregulation, I do know that the lowering of trade barriers is coming to a halt. All of the low- hanging fruit involved in trade negotiations has probably been picked, and we will be very fortunate if we can just stabilize the situation here without experiencing a rise in protectionism.

There has been a lot of discussion about the gap issue here, and I think for good reason as Ben Bernanke and Bill Poole have indicated. I might add that random walk does not mean that the inflation in 2004 is necessarily going to be the same as in 2003. That’s the expected value, but the outcome could very easily be 1½ points higher under foreseeable circumstances. What I think we have to ask ourselves is which of the various alternatives for policy can give us the most significant trouble if we are wrong. In that regard my judgment is that the expected value of inflation is in the area of its current level as far out as I can see. I also think that if we wanted to retain the “considerable period” language, we would be able to do that for a significant period of time. Indeed, I would guess that the most likely forecast of when we will have to move is not too far from when the futures market is currently anticipating that move will occur. We need to remember that we are talking very largely about a move in a tightening direction. There is a small probability that we might have to move rates lower should we suddenly run into some deflationary problems. That in my judgment is a very small probability, but it is not zero.

We are, therefore, essentially looking at the question of doing nothing or tightening. In that regard, the most costly mistake would be for us to be constrained by the “considerable period” phraseology at a time when inflationary pressures were building up fairly rapidly. If the probability that we will have to drop the “considerable period” reference is very high, which I think it is, it’s not clear to me what we gain by waiting. If, indeed, the economy is as buoyant as the discussion around this table has just described, then we are going to be pressed relatively quickly by market developments to start moving. In that event, the futures bulge now ten months out would very likely start to move closer in time. I don’t think that’s the most probable outcome, but it is a sufficiently large part of the probability tail to suggest to me that we ought to drop the “considerable period” language and adopt some reference to “patience.” The latter would in my view give us greater leeway to take action. We probably will also have to tack against the amount of liquidity that we’re pumping into the financial system. As Governor Gramlich rightly mentioned, it’s probably wise to call in the fire engines.

It’s one thing to look at the degree of liquidity after rates have been this low for this long and another to presume that the structure of the economy is going to stay this way if we continue to hold rates at this level for, say, another year and a half. So my view as far as policy is concerned is that it would not be a bad thing if we referred in some way to “patience” rather than to “considerable period” in our press statement and the markets responded in a negative way by moving up funds rate futures and long-term bond yields. Unless what I’ve heard this morning about business conditions and business sentiment is going to be dramatically reversed by the time of the next meeting, interest rates are too low. One may ask how that can be because a large number of market participants are aware of all these developments and in the past they presumably would have moved market rates higher by now. I would suggest that there is a very significant danger that they have listened to us! [Laughter] We have convinced them that the earlier simplistic view of our response to an upturn in economic growth and the associated risk of rising inflation does not apply under prevailing circumstances and will not lead us to tighten monetary policy in the near term. We have succeeded in demonstrating that such a view was now wrong. When we first argued that it was wrong, they didn’t believe us. We argued again, and they said, “Well, maybe.” We continued to argue that they were wrong, and they now believe us.

One implication in my judgment is that we can’t necessarily look, for example, at a chart showing the one-year maturity for the ten-year Treasury note nine years out, which is trading steadily at a little over 6 percent, and say that the market does not expect a rise in inflation. That may be what the numbers tell us. What I don’t know is whether that chart is based on market factors or whether I’m looking in a mirror. And I fear that it’s more the latter than the former. It is a terrific vote of confidence in the System or what Al Broaddus likes to call our credibility, but I’m not sure that we’re wise to sit here and allow that view to persist if indeed that is the case.

As a consequence and in line with our discussions at this and previous meetings regarding the desirability of taking gradual steps, I think today is the day we should adjust our press statement and move to a reference to “patience.” I think the downside risks to that change are small. I do think the market will react “negatively” as we used to say, but I’m not sure such a reaction would have negative implications, quite frankly. If we were to retain the “considerable period” wording, I would hate to find us in the position of seeing Citicorp’s forecast of a 300,000 increase in January employment number actually materialize in next week’s announcement. We would be in a very uncomfortable position. If we go to “patience,” we will have full flexibility to sit for a year or to move in a couple of months. I don’t think we’re going to want to do the latter, but I’d certainly like to be in that position should a rate increase become necessary. That’s my view. Who’d like to comment? Governor Kohn.

Greenspan doesn’t think the economy is in a bubble.

Greenspan is not sounding the alarm.

Greenspan does not even want to raise the Fed Funds rate above 1%/year. Greenspan wants “patience”.

Greenspan is painting a picture of an extraordinary “degree of buoyancy…. Committee members have not reported on indications of a more unequivocally benign and positive economic outlook in a number of years…” The “back in the late 90s” is not Greenspan saying “this is another bubble”–Greenspan says, explicitly, that “bubble” is “not yet… the appropriate word”. It is, rather, an assessment that the economy is currently performing well. After giving that assessment, Greenspan then segues to considering tail risks: saying “the outlook seems extraordinarily benign, and I’ll get to the reasons why that bothers me shortly”. That’s where the “snap-back” phrase comes from.

So Mallaby’s basic thesis–that Greenspan believed in January 2004 that the economy was in a dangerous bubble and on the edge of catastrophe–is directly falsified by a five-minute look at the document from which Mallaby got the two phrases he quotes.

Mallaby continues:

Of course, this begs a question: If Mr. Greenspan understood the danger of bubbles, why did he nonetheless permit them–even rationalizing his policy with a public insistence that the best way to deal with bubbles was to clean up after they burst?…

Since Greenspan did not understand the dangers in the mid-2000s, Mallaby is asking a false question. He then gives an answer to his false question, and it is an answer that would be greatly to Greenspan’s discredit, were it to be true:

Most of the explanation lies in the political environment…. Greenspan was a hardened Washington veteran… calculated that acting forcefully against bubbles would lead only to frustration and hostile political scrutiny. And his caution was vindicated. When he did try to rein in risk-taking—calling, for example, for restraints on the government-sponsored housing lenders—he felt the heat. The housing-industrial complex denounced him for failing to understand mortgage finance and ran devastating TV ads to deter members of Congress from supporting Mr. Greenspan’s calls for regulatory intervention.

As Mallaby paints the picture, Greenspan didn’t do what he clearly knew to be his clear job. Why not? Because he “felt the heat”. Because he was “denounced for failing to understand mortgage finance”. Plus there were those “devastating TV ads”!

All this is to set up Mallaby’s conclusion as to who are the real culprits here:

It is too easy, and too comforting, to blame Alan Greenspan’s supposed intellectual errors for the 2008 crisis…. The origins of the crisis lay not in the maestro’s failure of understanding–which would be easy to correct. Rather, it lay in the failure of our politics. Who in this electoral season would bet that we are safer now?

But this is wrong: Alan Greenspan made a bad call in the mid-2000s. Alan Greenspan was never a coward.

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Is Our Economists Learning?

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Is Our Economists Learning?: “Brad DeLong has an excellent presentation on the sad history of belief in the confidence fairy…

…and its dire effects on policy. One of his themes is the bad behavior of quite a few professional economists, who invented new doctrines on the fly to justify their opposition to stimulus and desire for austerity even in the face of a depression and zero interest rates.vOne quibble: I don’t think Brad makes it clear just how bad the Lucas-type claim that government spending would crowd out private investment even at the zero lower bound really was….

Two things crossed my virtual desk today that reinforce the point about how badly some of my colleagues continue to deal with fiscal policy issues. First, Greg Mankiw has a piece that talks about Alesina-Ardagna on expansionary austerity without mentioning any of the multiple studies refuting their results. And… as @obsoletedogma (Matt O’Brien) notes, he cites a 2002 Blanchard paper skeptical about fiscal stimulus while somehow not mentioning the famous 2013 Blanchard-Leigh paper showing that multipliers are much bigger than the IMF thought.

Second, I see a note from David Folkerts-Landau of Deutsche Bank lambasting the ECB for its easy-money policies, because: “by appointing itself the eurozone’s ‘whatever it takes’ saviour of last resort, the ECB has allowed politicians to sit on their hands with regard to growth-enhancing reforms and necessary fiscal consolidation. Thereby ECB policy is threatening the European project as a whole for the sake of short-term financial stability. The longer policy prevents the necessary catharsis, the more it contributes to the growth of populist or extremist politics.” Yep. That ‘catharsis’ worked really well when Chancellor Brüning did it, didn’t it?…

[In] the 1970s… stagflation led to a dramatic revision of both macroeconomics and policy doctrine. This time far worse economic events, and predictions by freshwater economists far more at odds with experience than the mistakes of Keynesians in the past, seem to have produced no concessions whatsoever.

Must-read: Noah Smith: “Brad DeLong Pulpifies a Cochrane Graph”

Must-Read: Very welcome backup from the very-sharp and extremely hard-working newly ex-academic Noah Smith. I very much hope his new career path is very successful: it deserves to be…

Noah Smith: Brad DeLong Pulpifies a Cochrane Graph: “I’ve always been highly skeptical of John Cochrane’s claim that if we simply launched a massive deregulatory effort…

…it would make us many times richer than we are today. Cochrane typically shows a graph of the World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ rankings vs. GDP, and claims that… if we boost our World Bank ranking slightly past the (totally hypothetical) ‘frontier’, we can make our country five times as rich as it currently is…. Brad DeLong, however, has done me one better. In a short yet magisterial blog post, DeLong shows that even if Cochrane is right that countries can move freely around the World Bank ranking graph, the policy conclusions are incredibly sensitive to the choice of functional form….

DeLong… decides to do his own curve-fitting exercise. Instead of a linear model for log GDP, he fits a quadratic polynomial, a cubic polynomial, and a quartic polynomial…. Cochrane’s conclusion disappears entirely! As soon as you add even a little curvature to the function, the data tell us that the U.S. is actually at or very near the optimal policy frontier. DeLong also posts his R code in case you want to play with it yourself. This is a dramatic pulpification of a type rarely seen these days. (And Greg Mankiw gets caught in the blast wave.)…

You’d think Cochrane would care about this possibility enough to at least play around with slightly different functional forms before declaring in the Wall Street Journal that we can boost our per capita income to $400,000 per person by launching an all-out attack on the regulatory state. I mean, how much effort does it take? Not much. And this is an important issue. An all-out attack on the regulatory state would inevitably destroy many regulations that have a net social benefit. The cost would be high. Economists shouldn’t bend over backwards to try to show that the benefits would be even higher. That’s just not good policy advice.

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Play with the R-code if you want to see how much a more flexible functional form wants to say that the U.S. has the optimal “Business Climate”: http://tinyurl.com/dl20160505c. I.e.:

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Must-read: Noah Smith: “Policy Recommendations and Wishful Thinking”

Must-Read: I must say I am getting more than a whiff of the disastrous trope that “it is the duty of an organic intellectual to support the Movement” here.

The technocratic view is that there will be a bunch of competing ideological views and material interests pulling and hauling, and that by always wading in and joining the tug-of-war side that has the better policy idea at the moment in the issue under dispute one will get better governance and higher societal well-being. The opposite view is: There is a Movement, the Movement is good because the Movement is supported by the class whose interest is the general interest and by Correct Ideological Thought, and all progressives must support the movement.

That is a disastrous pattern of thought. I am 100% with Noah Smith here:

Noah Smith: Policy Recommendations and Wishful Thinking: “There was a bit of a blow-up earlier this year over Gerald Friedman’s analysis of Bernie Sanders’ economic plans…

…To me, it seemed that the coup-de-grace was delivered by Justin Wolfers…. Friedman admits he made a mistake and then says that his conclusion was right anyway, because we can go find some alternative assumptions that make his original conclusion hold. To me this is transparently assuming the conclusion. That’s a big no-no, and while a lot of macroeconomists probably do this, it looks really bad to admit to it! (I’m also starting to realize that ‘Joan Robinson’ is a sort of an invincible rhetorical refuge for lefty macro types, the way ‘Friedrich Hayek’ is for righty macro types.)….

The fracas quieted down, but now it’s back. Friedman and allies are no longer saying that their analysis is ‘just standard economics’, since they had to switch to non-standard economics to make the conclusions come out the way they wanted. The line now is that Krugman, the Romers, et al. are just a bunch of pessimists, who are unintentionally playing into the hands of conservatives…. Krugman was not happy about this, and blogger ProGrowthLiberal was pretty mad:

The claim that economists like Christina and David Romer bought into the New Classical revolution is both absurd and dishonest…[W]e critics do admit we are below full employment and we have been calling for fiscal stimulus. On this score, the latest from J.W. Mason is even more dishonest than the latest from Gerald Friedman. Guys–you do not win a debate by lying about the other side’s position….

I don’t like what Friedman and Mason are doing. I think economists have a duty to look at the facts as objectively as they can, regardless of their emotions and desires. You shouldn’t prefer Model B over Model A just because one leads to ‘hope’ and the other to ‘hopelessness’…. Friedman and Mason seem to be arguing that our belief about the facts should be driven, at least in part, by our desire to avoid a feeling of powerlessness. They also seem to be saying that if the facts seem to support conservative policies, even a tiny bit, we should reinterpret the facts. I don’t like this approach. It seems anti-rationalist to me, and I think that if wonks behave this way, they’ll end up recommending lots of bad policies.

Cf. Henry Farrell’s 2011 attack on Matt Yglesias:

Henry Farrell (2011): The Limits of Left Neo-Liberalism: “[Doug Henwood is] wrong in the particulars…

…But… Doug is onto something significant…. Left neo-liberalism in the US… have always lacked a good theory of politics… tend[s] to favor a combination of market mechanisms and technocratic solutions to solve social problems. But… politics… requires strong collective actors…. I see Doug and others as arguing that successful political change requires large scale organized collective action, and that this in turn requires the correction of major power imbalances (e.g. between labor and capital). They’re also arguing that neo-liberal policies at best tend not to help correct these imbalances, and they seem to me to have a pretty good case…. It’s hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics. I’m sure that critics can point to political blind spots among lefties (e.g. the difficulties in figuring out what is a necessary compromise, and what is a blatant sell-out), but these don’t seem to me to be potentially crippling, in the way that the absence of a neo-liberal theory of politics (who are the organized interest groups and collective actors who will push consistently for technocratic efficiency?) is…

People should say that policies are good if they tend to do good things–to make people freer and richer. People should not say that policies are good if they tend to build the Movement, for there is neither Correct Ideological Thought nor a universal class whose interests are identical to the general interest. And people should, especially, not misrepresent what policies are likely to do in the interest of building the Movement.

And where the Movement is good, the policies that advance it will also be the policies that make technocratic sense…

Must-read: ProGrowthLiberal: “Social Security Replacement Rates as Reported by the CBO”

Must-Read: ProGrowthLiberal: Social Security Replacement Rates as Reported by the CBO: “Brian Faler warned us a year ago…

Republicans on Friday named Keith Hall head of the Congressional Budget Office, installing a conservative Bush administration economist atop an agency charged with determining how much lawmakers’ bills would cost…

Keith Hall just admitted:

After questions were raised by outside analysts, we identified some errors in one part of our report, CBO’s 2015 Long-Term Projections for Social Security: Additional Information, which was released on December 16, 2015. The errors occurred in CBO’s calculations of replacement rates—the ratio of Social Security recipients’ benefits to their past earnings.

Who were these outside analysts and what was this about? Alicia Munnell explains:

CBO suggests that Social Security is getting more generous every day. The stage is being set for cuts in Social Security, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has become a major player in this effort. The agency’s most recent report shows not only a huge increase in the 75-year deficit, but also an enormous increase in the generosity of the program as measured by replacement rates — benefits relative to pre-retirement earnings. None of the changes that increase the deficit — lower interest rates, higher incidence of disability, longer life expectancy, and a lower share of taxable earnings — should have any major effect on replacement rates. CBO has simply been revising its methodology each year in ways that produce higher numbers….

Putting out such a high number without any effort to reconcile it with the historical data is irresponsible. And those waiting for an opportunity to show that Social Security is excessively generous have pounced on the new CBO replacement rate number and publicized it in op-eds from coast-to-coast. Social Security is the backbone of the nation’s retirement system. Its finances need to be treated more thoughtfully.

Agreed. My only question is whether anyone in Congress can the courage to demand that Mr. Hall explain…

Must-read: Paul Krugman: “Bully for Neurotoxins”

Bully for Neurotoxins The New York Times

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Bully for Neurotoxins: “The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable editorial titled “The Carnage in Coal Country”…

…accusing President Obama of destroying jobs through his terrible, horrible, no good regulations on coal… ‘40,000 coal jobs… lost… since 2008.’… But what really struck me were… the editorial sneers that we’re ‘still waiting for all those new green jobs Mr. Obama has been promising since he arrived in Washington’… [and] that the editorial simply takes it as a given that any regulation is bad, including regulations on mercury and coal ash…. Mercury is a neurotoxin, which can impair intelligence; other heavy metals can cause cancer and poison people…. In what moral or even economic universe is it obviously wrong to limit emissions of neurotoxins?

Today’s economic history: Oliver Wendell Holmes in Lochner

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Dissent: Lochner v. People of State of New York: “I regret sincerely that I am unable to agree with the judgment…. This case is decided upon an economic theory…

…which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further…. But I do not conceive that to be my duty…. It is settled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we as legislators might think as injudicious, or if you like as tyrannical, as this, and which, equally with this, interfere with the liberty to contract. Sunday laws and usury laws are ancient examples. A more modern one is the prohibition of lotteries. The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.

The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. The other day we sustained the Massachusetts vaccination law, and state statutes and decisions cutting down the liberty to contract by way of combination are familiar to this court. Two years ago we upheld the prohibition of sales of stock on margins, or for future delivery, in the Constitution of California. Some of these laws embody convictions or prejudices which judges are likely to share. Some may not. But a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States….

I think that the word ‘liberty,’ in the 14th Amendment, is perverted… unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute… would infringe fundamental principles… of our people and our law…. No such sweeping condemnation can be passed upon the statute before us. A reasonable man might think it a proper measure on the score of health. Men whom I certainly could not pronounce unreasonable would uphold it as a first installment of a general regulation of the hours of work. Whether in the latter aspect it would be open to the charge of inequality I think it unnecessary to discuss.