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A strange question, but with a point: Do you imagine that Stephen Moore has ever even heard of Emi Nakamura, the excellent choice for this year's Clark Medal in economics? 1/
Now, even if Moore weren't a charlatan and crank, they'd be in very different businesses. Nakamura is a scholar, not a policy advocate – what she does really is economics as a science, involving careful observation and testing of theory 2/
But policy advocates are supposed to at least be aware of relevant scholarship. Anyone who seriously cares about macroeconomics has been following Nakamura's work with Jon Steinsson for years. Here's me a few years ago 3/
And Nakamura's work is directly relevant to key disputes in the field. Her most influential work involved producing new evidence on price rigidity, aka sticky prices – the fact that many prices stay constant for fairly long periods 4/ aeaweb.org/about-aea/hono…
Such price rigidity is central to the argument that monetary policy should focus on core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rather than headline inflation – a concept Moore has said he finds incomprehensible 5/ krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/cor…
Now, Nakamura's work often feels as if it lends support to a more or less Keynesian view of the world, but that's because the facts appear to have a Keynesian bias. There's no hint that she starts with an ideological agenda. As I said, she's doing science 6/
Now, people like Joe Stiglitz, or Larry Summers, or, well, me do have clear political preferences, and deploy economic analysis on behalf of those preferences. But we listen to and respect the science. People like Moore don't 7/
And it's really telling that the GOP – not just Trump, but the whole party – prefers creatures like Moore to economists, even relatively conservative economists, who do pay attention to evidence 8/
