More reasons to like Bush and Cheney
In 1999, when the Republican presidential primaries were underway, I felt much better about Bush when I learned two things. First, he liked to pronounce “intellectuals” as “int-eye-lektuals.” Second, he liked to wear his Texas Air National Guard jacket to class are Harvard Business School, just to annoy all the lefties there (and no, I can’t remember where I read either of them). How can you not like someone who enjoys driving the left nuts.
Brad DeLong still has nothing to say about Edwards’ advocacy of protectionism. And now Mark Kleiman is similarly driven so nutty he is reduced to frivolous scams. Okay, not really. But he does assure us that we are to take seriously criticisms of Bush by Joe Stiglitz, because Stiglitz is a really, really smart guy who won a Nobel Prize. While it is true that Stiglitz is really, really smart and won a Nobel prize, it says little about his skills as a policy analyst, which are a mix of arrogance and ineptitude. By Kleiman’s reasoning, because Einstein was really, really smart and won a Nobel prize, we should take seriously his views on the use of nuclear weapons, rather than dismissing them asapologetics for Stalin by a Communist dupe.
Kleiman also refers happily to an open letter attacking Bush, signed by 169 business school professors, including 56 from Harvard. (Kleiman’s post says 200. KLEIMAN LIED! LIED, I TELL YOU!) Clearly, Harvard is mad that George Bush sullied their reputation for pristine liberalism. Recall James Wilson’s comment, in his 1967 Commentary piece on Reagan, that not only did he not agree with Reagan, but that “even if I thought like that, which I don’t, I would never write it down anywhere my colleagues at Harvard might read it.”
The b-school profs’ letter is pretty standard stuff, and I would write about it if I could stay awake through the whole letter. I am more interested in examining Kleiman’s “look at all these hotshots” argument. Kleiman says of them:
Note these are business school professors, not pointy-headed liberal academic economists.
As if business school professors are hard headed Republican businessmen or something like that. Take a look at the list. A lot of these people I never heard of, because their work is far away from my own, but we can look them up. I will stick to the Harvard crowd.
Amy Edmondson and David Thomas are psychologists.
Debora Spar is a political scientist.
George Baker is an economist whose expertise is the structure of firms.
James Austin is a specialist in non-profit firms.
James Sebenius is an expert in negotiations.
Alfred Chandler, Thomas McGraw, and Richard Tedlow are all historians.
Joel Podolny is a sociologist.
No doubt these are smart people, but that does not give them any special expertise on fiscal policy. Some on the list do have expertise in that area, but this list is not being sold as a list of fiscal policy experts. It is being sold as a list of business school professors. And frankly, it is being sold that way for exactly the reason Kleiman is using it: an attempt to say that these are down-to-earth people, not typically left-wing academics. Business schools are filled with historians, sociologists, psychologists, and economists, who are just as pointy-headed (to use Kleiman’s term) as any other academic.
And this, folks, is what is known as a scam. The letter begins “As professors of economics and business . . .”. Alfred Chandler is a fine historian, but he knows no more about the consequences of a current account deficit than, say, a specialist on George Eliot in Harvard’s English department.
UPDATE: I misread Kleiman’s post, and mistakenly thought that Stiglitz had organized the letter. It is not clear who organized it. Accordingly, harsh comments about Stiglitz have been removed.