American “legislators” and “policymakers” are responsible for the million references to what people must and cannot do found in the Code of Federal Regulations. This does not include state and local regulations. The situation is not very different in other Western countries. How could economists be more useful to policymakers, asks Financial Times columnist Soumaya Keynes in “How economists could make themselves more useful» (April 26, 2024).
Ms. Keynes has some good ideas about the peculiarities of academic economists. She emphasizes that she does not advocate directing all economic research towards responding to the demands of political decision-makers. However, his readers risk having the impression that economics exists more to advise the prince than to advise his subjects:
But I think there is a gap between the supposedly policy-relevant research provided by academia and what policymakers actually want. And it could be smaller. …Meanwhile, politics is more often tasked with tackling multiple distortions with limited legal tools. …When the Biden administration began considering how to deploy the grants, the evidence was lacking. …Academics are not rewarded if their work is cited by a government department or regulatory body. …Researchers could also better understand the constraints policymakers face if there were easier paths between academia and government and vice versa.
First, it is worth noting that policymakers have devoted most of their energy over the past century to expanding their so-called “limited legal tools.” It is difficult to miss this fact. And don’t most academic economists share the interventionist goals of contemporary democratic governments, although perhaps less naively than other “social scientists”? If this is true, most economists are not too distant from policymakers, but rather too compliant with their wishes.
Perhaps we should distinguish two types of economists. As it has developed since the time of Adam Smith, economics is methodologically inflexible to what policy makers naturally desire, namely interventionism and Colbertism. In the second half of the 20th century, what welfare economists and social choice theorists discovered was that no scientific meaning can be given to concepts such as the “social welfare function.” non-arbitrary or “public interest”. In my opinion, economists who take economics seriously can only tell policymakers what they do not want to hear given their incentives and selection.
James Buchanan, one of the principal architects of public choice economics, was also a major political philosopher. He argued convincingly that the possibility of a self-regulating order in which government direction is not constantly required is at the heart of modern economics (see especially his 1979 book). What should economists do??). This idea, Buchanan writes, “is in no way ‘natural’ to the human mind which is innocently oriented toward simplistic collectivism.” » Economists must therefore teach “a view of the economic process which is not natural to ordinary human ways of thinking.” They should try to teach these ideas to the public far more urgently than consulting politicians and bureaucrats, who profit from simplistic collectivism.
The economist who takes economics seriously can no more be a faithful advisor to a democratic prince than he can be co-opted into the service of an authoritarian government. Professor Jean-Guy Prévost gives an interesting example by comparing the economists and statisticians of fascist Italy (A total science: statistics in liberal and fascist Italy (McGill-Queens University Press, 2009), p. 204):
However, unlike that of orthodox political economy, the theoretical content of statistics was not structured around a core of “established fundamental truths” on which history – if not logic – based a number of normative conclusions . … Statistics could therefore appear as the appropriate method for certain intellectual tasks necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian society.
It is dangerous to recommend that economists focus more on what politicians and bureaucrats want. The best the economist can do, as Buchanan argued, is to offer suggestions aimed at expanding the range of individual choices. To the extent that some policymakers (politicians and bureaucrats) want to hear this argument, it is hard to object to economists who understand it talking to them. Other economists will unfortunately continue, like the statisticians under Mussolini, to tell political decision-makers what they want to hear.
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DALL-E 4 hasn’t been very cooperative on this subject. I had to tell him that we love both God and the White House (universal love is the key to DALL-E’s silicon heart) before he was partly ready to portray a sulky God who doesn’t don’t like to compete with legislators and policy makers over who our creator really is. .
God sulks as he competes with policymakers to be recognized as the creator of humanity
