Hackonomists

A lot of liberal bloggers (e.g. Steve Clemons and Ezra Klein) are annoyed at Obama for choosing Jason Furman, a centrist business-school prof, as his chief economic advisor. They'd prefer someone more progressive - but who? In these blog posts, two names repeatedly come up: Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein.

Both of these men started as assistant professors and quickly jumped to liberal think tanks (a career path I've been strongly considering for myself). Baker works at the Center for Economic Progress, Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute. Both have spent most of their careers arguing for political points of view, rather than doing academic research. Klein calls Bernstein a "labor economist," but from what I can can tell, he's not using it in the typical sense of "an economist who studies the labor market," but rather to mean "an economist who is sensitive to the interests of labor."

I guess I kind of view this as a dangerous trend. In the 70s and 80s, Republicans started taking their economic cues from political hacks like Art Laffer, and discarded sound economic policy in favor of a "cut taxes, borrow massively, and forget about investment" approach. It's reached the point where every Weekly Standard columnist thinks he's an economics expert just by repeating the phrase "tax cuts." Is this where the Democratic party is headed? Academic economists replaced by think-tank "hackonomists"?

"But Mr. Noah," you may say, "aren't you yourself thinking about possibly becoming one of those hackonomists?" The answer is yes. But as a hackonomist, I would never put myself forth as an expert in the same league as a dedicated academic. I would see my role as someone who synthesized the knowledge gleaned from academic research into a politically coherent policy package. If I advised a campaign, it would be on how to formulate a political message, not how to run policy.

There's a good chance that Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein also see themselves in this role. If so, great. But let other Democrats take heed: hackonomists are a complement, not a substitute, for economists.