In early April, Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, was speaking via Zoom to a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties. The economy had just been shut down, unemployment was spiking and some policymakers were predicting an era worse than the Great Depression. The economic carnage seemed likely to doom President Donald Trump’s chances at reelection.
Furman, tapped to give the opening presentation, looked into his screen of poorly lit boxes of frightened wonks and made a startling claim.
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” he said.
“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said in an interview. Instead of forecasting a prolonged Depression-level economic catastrophe, Furman laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and gross domestic product growth ever.
Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
Anything to this? No idea. Now and then, I find myself thinking that "sciences" like political analysis or economics aren't really sciences at all but modern, "respectable" versions of astrology. In other words, a bunch of people with degrees sitting around guessing about stuff (I mean, if you can give a Nobel Prize to Paul Krugman, for God's sake...).
So I'll just say that considering Trump's run so far, it wouldn't surprise me.
3 comments:
They are 'sciences' in an older sense of the term, in that they are branches of knowledge and your aim is to discover rather than to create.
The problem, of course, is not that they cannot improve your understanding of the world, but rather than the corruption of academe is so severe that they often will not. To some extent that's haphazard methodology at work, but it's also because the balance of normative assumptions in certain disciplines is so skewed that the disciplines can only function as apologetical exercises. This is especially true in sociology, where dissidents are subject to professional harassment. The clientele of higher education would likely benefit if certain faculties disappeared and others would benefit if departments were pulled apart and their components re-distributed. (Paul Vitz has offered that psychology may break up into a series of successor disciplines).
My father-in-law used to describe economists' method as "assume away the problem and solve the residual."
Nonetheless, I think Furman may be right, judging by the how the market is behaving.
Your father-in-law was a wise man. Of course, these days, that's true about a great many things.
Starting with Trump's election.
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