More Obama entertainment

It has been fun watching Obama screw the nutroots by recreating the Clinton administration. This is not altogether a good thing, since Clinton foreign policy consisted mostly of avoiding problems so that the next president would have to deal with them, and Eric Holder could easily be as bad as Janet Reno (remember the 21 children killed in the ATF created Waco fiasco?). But it is not the lunacy the nutroots want. Herewith another potential bit of good cheer. Jonathan Zasloff at the humorously titled Reality Based Community is worried that Joseph Stiglitz is not part of Obama’s economic team. Those of us who live in the real world are relieved. Stiglitz is indisputably a really, really smart guy and a brilliant economic theorist. He is also less than skillful as a policy analyst. Kenneth Rogoff’s demolition job on Stiglitz as policy maker is pretty thorough.

Second, you put forth a blueprint for how you believe the IMF can radically improve its advice on macroeconomic policy. Your ideas are at best highly controversial, at worst, snake oil. This leads to my third and most important point. In your role as chief economist at the World Bank, you decided to become what you see as a heroic whistleblower, speaking out against macroeconomic policies adopted during the 1990s Asian crisis that you believed to be misguided. You were 100% sure of yourself, 100% sure that your policies were absolutely the right ones. In the middle of a global wave of speculative attacks, that you yourself labeled a crisis of confidence, you fueled the panic by undermining confidence in the very institutions you were working for. Did it ever occur to you for a moment that your actions might have hurt the poor and indigent people in Asia that you care about so deeply? Do you ever lose a night’s sleep thinking that just maybe, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, and Stan Fischer had it right—and that your impulsive actions might have deepened the downturn or delayed—even for a day—the recovery we now see in Asia?
That paragraph summarizes Rogoff’s two criticisms of Stiglitz: his policy proposals are not very good, and he is breathtakingly and foolishly arrogant. Timothy Geithner has spent his career working in policy jobs. Larry Summers and Christina Romer are academic economists with a lot of experience in empirical work, which means they have experience dealing with the messy empirical problems of sorting out economic models. That Obama did not choose Stiglitz is good economic news, and that the hard left is unhappy about it is fun news.