Morning Must-Read: Dean Baker: Influencing the Debate from Outside the Mainstream: Keep it Simple

Dean Baker: Influencing the Debate from Outside the Mainstream: Keep it Simple: “The route for making progress is to get outside of the profession…

…For this it is necessary to appeal to people in policy positions, to reporters, to the general public, or to people who might follow economic debates, but don’t have extensive backgrounds in economics. And it is important to recognize what you are asking these people to do. You are asking these people to accept your claims over the claims of the most prominent economists in the profession. This means that you better keep what you have to say simple…. To my mind the gold standard is a chart with two bars, where bar A is bigger than bar B…. The first, and perhaps best, example is the debate over the famous Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt cliff…. President Bush said that he had just gained some political capital and that he intended to now use it. The task at hand was privatizing Social Security…. The big potential attraction to many people who were not especially political was the promise of getting a much higher benefit on average from investing their money in the stock market…. The problem with this assumption is the price to earnings ratios in the stock market were far above their historic average…. Arguing this point directly on its merits required more attention from reporters and people in policy positions than they were prepared to sacrifice; so we… developed the ‘no economist left behind test’… write down decade by decade averages for dividend yields and capital gains that would add up to give their 7.0 percent real return over Social Security’s 75-year forecasting horizon…. Finally Paul Krugman blasted the test into the national debate with a column in early February…