Thread by @Noahpinion

Today's @bopinion post is about how Republicans, and the conservative movement more generally, are turning away from the economics profession as their go-to source of expertise.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

In 2010, Obama nominated a Nobel Prize-winning macroeconomist to the Fed board.

Republicans blocked him because they said he wasn't experienced enough.

Mark Calabria, a Republican policy adviser and think-tank guy, wrote that "the last thing the Fed needs is another PhD in economics":
cato.org/publications/c…

Calabria then wrote that having too many econ PhDs at the Fed was leading to "rampant inflation".

Narrator voice: There was no rampant inflation.

Diamond had to withdraw his nomination in 2011.

Now, 8 years later, look who Republicans are supporting for the Fed board:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

And of course, Trump is also nominating Herman Cain. Who at least served as chairman of the board of a regional Fed bank, and is not a blatant know-nothing apparatchik like Moore!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

But what this really shows is that Republicans are turning away from the econ profession as their source of expertise.

This feels like a big shift. In the 70s and 80s, the big guns of economics were conservative types. Milton Friedman had a PBS show!

And Republicans & conservatives created a vast apparatus of think-tankers and commentators who acted as if Econ 101 was on their side:

amazon.com/Economism-Bad-…

But in the 90s the tide turned. Empiricism slowly took over the profession, leading economists to realize that government intervention wasn't as dangerous as the Econ 101 textbooks might imply.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

And a new crop of public-facing econ starts - @paulkrugman, @JosephEStiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and others - leaned decidedly to the left.

The era of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School was over.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

In recent years, the econ profession is abandoning its monomaniacal focus on efficiency, and starting to think a lot more about inequality.

The fact that economics is no longer "the conservative science" may explain why Republicans no longer seem to view the profession as their ally.

Or it may be part of a general turn against expertise on the political Right. Hard to say.

In any case, the public needs to realize that the economics profession can no longer be described as a conservative or right-leaning enterprise!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

(end)