Rattle Shaking Shamen

This particular piece by the inestimable Dean Baker is about Economics but could just as easily apply to any other form of Academic Credentialism.

How about a little accountability for economists when they mess up?
Dean Baker, The Guardian
Thursday 27 July 2017

Suppose our fire department was staffed with out-of-shape incompetents who didn’t know how to handle a firehose. That would be really bad news, but it wouldn’t be obvious most of the time because we don’t often see major fires. The fire department’s inadequacy would become apparent only when a major fire hit, and we were left with a vast amount of unnecessary death and destruction. This is essentially the story of modern economics.

The problem is not that modern economics lacks the tools needed to understand the economy. Just as with firefighting, the basics have been well known for a long time. The problem is with the behavior and the incentive structure of the practitioners. There is overwhelming pressure to produce work that supports the status quo (for example, redistributing to the rich), that doesn’t question authority, and that is needlessly complex.

The result is a discipline in which much of the work is of little use, except to legitimate the existing power structure. In terms of the poor quality of work, it is easy to point to the failure to recognize the size and risks posed by the housing bubble in the last decade. This failure has been unbelievably costly to the US and the rest of the world.

If we compare the most recent estimates of the potential GDP of the US economy from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) with the projections made in 2008, before the severity of the crash was recognized, the difference is $1.8tn. This is an annual figure; it implies a loss of $18tn over the course of the decade. This amount averages out to more than $54,000 for every person in the country. Other countries have seen even larger losses.

CBO is not God, so it could have been overly optimistic before the crash and is arguably too pessimistic at present. But even if we cut the number in half, we are still looking at a loss of $9tn over the course of a decade, or $27,000 per person. It is also worth noting that CBO’s numbers are useful here not only because they are seen as authoritative, but they are in the center of the profession by design. CBO raises or lowers its numbers if they are out of line with the consensus of economic forecasters.

The retrospective analyses of the overall crash have focused on the financial crisis specifically. These analyses have worked hard to convince people that seeing an impending financial crisis is an extremely difficult undertaking, but the reality is that the financial crisis was very much secondary. The overwhelming reason for the downturn and the weak recovery was the collapse of housing bubbles in the US and elsewhere that were driving growth.
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It is easy to extend the list of failings in the economics profession. It is just now becoming accepted that our pattern of trade imposes substantial costs on large segments of the working population. This didn’t require any new or novel innovations. This is a prediction of the completely mainstream Stolper-Samuelson theorem, first published three-quarters of a century ago.

And why is there so little research devoted to analysis of alternatives to patent financing of prescription drug research? The markups associated with patent protection in the sector are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent. Every competent economist knows that a gap that large between a government-protected price and a free-market price is a recipe for massive waste and corruption. The gap between patent-protected drug prices and free-market prices is now approaching $400bn a year in the US alone (more than 2% of GDP). This doesn’t require new economic thinking; it requires economists who know introductory economics.

And how about a little accountability for economists when they mess up? There is much literature on the importance of being able to dismiss workers who do not perform their jobs well. We all know and expect that a dishwasher who keeps breaking the dishes or a custodian who can’t clean the toilets loses his job.

I have suggested that economists who prescribe policies that turn out badly, or who can’t see multitrillion dollar housing bubbles coming whose collapse sinks the economy, ought to pay a price in terms of their careers. Invariably people think I am joking. When they realize I am serious, they think I am crazy or vindictive.

Leaving aside motives, let me just speak to the economics. If we have a profession in which people are rewarded with high pay and career advancement for saying the same thing as everyone else, and never face any consequences when the accepted wisdom proves to be wrong, then we should expect to see economists like the firefighters mentioned at the beginning of this piece. They aren’t qualified to do the job and our only hope is that we don’t see any more major fires.

Our current “Meritocracy” which is anything but rewards two contradictory qualities- conventional thinking and novelty. A result is not worthy unless it simultaneously reinforces the status quo while appearing complicated, difficult, and different.

You don’t get the big bucks for reinventing the digging stick even if that’s all you need.