The Burden of Brilliant Economists

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Markets, Not Economists, Will Help the Economy

George has a good one here, worth the read. I do love the context of BOs claim for "helping to save or create 2.5 million jobs". A classic meaningless statement. Here is some context -- I love the "Before Reagan / After Reagan" part, the change to an economy that averaged a million more jobs a year after Reagan's first term is the kind of results that the MSM isn't that interested in providing for context:

"Since Eisenhower's first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan's first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House."

What will the benchmark be after BO? How many jobs the economy LOST in a 4 year term? Here is the punchline of the piece--George has a wit that is very urbane and subtle, but it certainly gets the point across.

In his wise book "Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes' central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that "the state is wise and the market is stupid." Mueller continues: "Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.'"

Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes' followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists.