#morici

From Peter Morici’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today:

“ Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, unlike most professional economists, does not let what personal feelings he has towards politicians cloud his thinking. “

Wow.  With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Morici’s piece essentially tars all “professional economists” with a scandalous brush.  In fact, “professional economists” all learn in the first day of undergraduate training an ingrained lesson: that personal opinions are one thing (the common saying is, everyone has one) ... but the methodology of economics is to do positive science.  Model, hypothesis, data, evaluation.

In other words, Morici gets it completely wrong.  For nearly all economists who have personal feelings, they are trained to disclose those as such and separate them from their analytical results and professional opinions.

Could it be that Morici is listening too much to the advice of Trump’s economic advisor Peter Navarro, who went on the news yesterday to say, “There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.”

Is that the way Morici and others in the Trump Administration think economists speak.  If so, I’m truly appalled.  The Kool-Aid problem in the conspiracy laden, ad hominem strategy quickly is losing its ability to discuss anything neutrally.  No wonder they want to tar everyone else with the same brush.

Morici goes on to say:  “As for a trade war, economists can’t get over the fact that free trade did not work out for the vast swath of interior America, because the Chinese hardly play by free-trade rules.”

This almost does not dignify a response.  Every economist, ever, understands that free trade results in winners and losers.  I would wager 98.5% of “professional economists” understand, acknowledge, and are highly cognizant  that the rise of Donald Trump’s populism, isolationism, and support that he enjoys from the midwest has been driven to a large degree by the failures or decisions (whichever way you look at it) of the political leadership to do something about the outcomes of free trade for the losers over the past, say, forty years.

Economists get it.  Morici, like so many others bolstering the Trump Administration, is simply using rhetoric to cast shade on others as an attempt to hijack ignorant readers into thinking that his underdog opinions have more weight than they do.  I notice he did not engage in any facts.

For support of my argument, go to the National Bureau of Economic Research website, and search for any phrases like, “free trade inequality middle class”.  According to the search, professional economists have debated these issues in 30,000 research papers.  Even if you eliminate, say, 80% for an overly broad search term, that still leaves thousands of papers on the topic of one of the academic resources for economists that present their analytical results, as distinguished from their personal opinions, whatever those may be.

#20: clipe que conta uma estória

#19: se apaixona pela mulher do melhor amigo