http://time.com/4555032/economists-against-donald-trump/
Three hundred and seventy economists, including
eight Nobel Prize winners, co-signed a
letter that asserts, “
Donald Trump is a dangerous, destructive choice for the country. He misinforms the electorate, degrades trust in public institutions with conspiracy theories, and promotes willful delusion over engagement with reality.”
...
They also write that trade agreements have not cut national income and wealth, which has risen because, as the signatories write, trade is not “zero-sum.” ("Freedom to trade" was on a list of “what America needs” in a September statement of concern about “Hillary Clinton’s economic agenda” signed by
300 economists. An Oct. 31 statement
by 19 Nobel laureates in economics decried Trump's "reckless threats to start trade wars with several of our largest trading partners.")
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It is going to be interesting to see if Trump and his cabinet and the GOP Congress listen to the economists or ignore then like Bush did.
It seems to me interesting that the MSM did not follow up on this more than they did. If Trump and the GOP blow it again, we will take years to dig out from under another series of ignorant and destructive blunders.
Economics is where the road meets the rubber. This is where foolish policies really hurt the nation. I don't see much chance that this collision with incompetence can be avoided.
It isn't just Trump, over the last thirty years or so the Republican party and movement conservatism have slowly but ever increasingly disassociated themselves from reality. Trumpism is the inevitable result of this process, a political philosophy built solely on lies and fantasies, that boldly dismisses any fact that stands in the way of its ideology, which is to direct as much of the economic surplus to the already rich as possible.
Conservatives are suppose to be the ones who tell us that we are moving too fast and that we don't need to change. The Republicans have moved past conservatism, to being full blown reactionaries. They are trying to rollback changes to a past that only existed in their collective imaginations.
But economists have to share part of the blame for Trumpism. Beyond a few far right fringe groups, i.e. the Austrian/Libertarian economics, I see no support for the fantasy of a self-regulating free market in mainstream economics today. What little there was died in the Great Financial Crisis and Recession*. And yet economists have allowed the fantasy to persist in the political economics without any real pushback from mainstream economics, largely because there is no consensus with what to replace it.
And yet, still the self-organizing, self-regulating free market, little or no government intervention in the economy, free trade, and even the return to the gold standard, which has been in a plank in every Republican presidential platform since at least 2004, remain the very core of Republican policies and thinking.
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* cite for example,
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist of Columbia University, past Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors and former Chief Economist of the World Bank, wrote in a forward for a new edition of Karl Polanyi's
The Great Transformation, in 2001,
... Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation [1944, sd] before modern economists clarified the limitations of self-regulating markets. Today, there is no respectable intellectual support for the proposition that markets, by themselves, lead to efficient, let alone equitable outcomes. Whenever information is imperfect or markets are incomplete—that is, essentially always—interventions exist that in principle could improve the efficiency of resource allocation. We have moved, by and large, to a more balanced position, one that recognizes both the power and the limitations of markets, and the necessity that government play a large role in the economy, though the bounds of that role remain in dispute. ...
Believers in self- regulating markets implicitly believed in a kind of Say's law, that the supply of labor would create its own demand. For capitalists who thrive off of low wages, the high unemployment may even be a benefit, as it puts downward pressure on workers' wage demands. But for economists, the unemployed workers demonstrate a malfunctioning economy, and in all too many countries we see overwhelming evidence of this and other malfunctions. Some advocates of the self- regulating economy put part of the blame for these malfunctions on government itself; but whether this is true or not, the point is that the myth of the self-regulating economy is, today, virtually dead.
I have attached the forward to
The Great Transformation, here,
View attachment The Great Transformation- Polanyi_Forward only1.pdf, but the entire book is well worth reading. Polanyi was a economics historian, and this his greatest work, tracing the impact of the classical liberals' economics on Europe in the 19th century, producing the Gilded Age and spurring colonialism, and contributing to the causes of World Wars I and II. It should be required reading for students of economics as well as everyone who reads Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom, written the same year, 1944, in which Hayek made the failed prediction that the New Deal would turn the US into a totalitarian dictatorship. In contrast, Polanyi's predictions have come true repeatedly, the last being The Great Recession, the effects of which we still struggle to escape from.
A simple google search will turn up numerous e-copies of the book for download, all probably illegal.
