I'd be inclined to take the libertarian viewpoint seriously if the idea of testing wasn't just "Smart people won't be an early adopter of a new drug, and if there are problems, they won't be harmed, because only stupid people will take the new drug early. Market forces!" Government can't even help with making sure chemicals that no one understands get tested before they're guineapigged on the public?

I'm not sure if Yglesias is right that there would be more lawsuits. I'd be worried that I wouldn't have grounds to sue. Under what pretext would I sue? Harm? Negligence? They told me the chemicals that were in it. Caveat emptor.

Oh, and if you want to look at what an industry looks like sans FDA regulation: vitamins and hippie herbal remedies. Most of it doesn't work, you can't figure out what does, there's a greater risk of interaction because there's no requirements about labelling, and some people ending up shitting clay due to fraudulent colonics.

That's exactly the model we should emulate.

I like Cowen a lot, but this is a really dumb idea. You're going to leave it up to the prudence of people motivated to sell drugs on the one side, and motivated to take them, on the other, to discern appropriate risk? Not going to work. Self-deception and desperation will undermine prudence nearly every time.

3 - Not to mention another group of people motivated to scrape a whole lotta money off the top in between.

The main problem here is that economic theory doesn't actually say that this is the correct mechanism. A tort system works to the extent that it gives firms the correct incentives, but it gets consumer incentives wrong. You don't want to give $100 million payout to the first person to have a problem with a drug. Theory would say that the damage award should go to the government and be equally distributed among everybody.

Also, Tyler Cowen has been really annoying recently. Am I the only one who's noticed him seeming much more full of himself than in the past?

I think that the need to substantially penalize a company and the fact that that huge settlement has to go *somewhere* are sort of in conflict. You want to be able to get 100 million from a company who make products that kill people, but any individual claimant (even with their lawyer) is not going to be entitled to 100 million. I like the idea of giving the rest to the government--it just needs to be sent through the IRS or otherwise put into the general treasury, so no one directly involved in the case sees the bulk of the money.

On the regulation vs. litigation point, while Matt's basic point seems correct the details are a more than a bit questionable. Pharma is a *massively* regulated industry: extensive government approval is required to bring a product to market, once a product is on the market, consumers are forbidden by law from purchasing it directly, advertising to consumers is highly regulated, and on and on. Further, while all these "non-libertarian" aspects of the pharma industry are more or less the same in the US and Europe, lawsuits are less frequent in Europe. Perhaps the greater US libertarianism contributes to higher levels of tort, but it's also just true that US has a far more litigious climate even against industries that are highly regulated.

I'd be inclined to take the libertarian viewpoint seriously if the idea of testing wasn't just "Smart people won't be an early adopter of a new drug, and if there are problems, they won't be harmed, because only stupid people will take the new drug early. Market forces!"

I don't think that's a good summary of the libertarian approach. I am by no means an anti-FDA crusader (or at least, not by pharma industry standards). Nonetheless, I think it unquestionable that costs and delays inherent in the FDA process impose a substantial human cost. With less regulation we would have more drugs on the market, and we would have them sooner. Rituxamab improves survival in lymphoma by ~10%. I bet there's at least one guy out there who would have benefitted had it been approved in 1995 not 1997.

That said, it's not clear that a lymphoma patient would have been well-advised to take rituxamab right out of the test tube. There is some safety database necessary before any patient should take or doctor should prescribe a new drug. What is that database? Is it the same for every patient? Usually a regulatory process leads to more standardization. If you are willing to take new drug X after animal safety and initial human safety data but before efficacy has been established by two "adequate and well controlled" clinical studies, usually you can't.* Or at least, not unless you participate in a clinical trial. Is that the correct assessment of risk for all patients? Probably not. The FDA already recognizes that different diseases should have different standards. And the 'fast-tracking' of cancer agents has been a step in the right direction. As too has been the increasing use of 'post-marketing' surveillance (that is, FDA approval contingent upon follow-up studies). Further liberalization of approval requirements are continuations of these trends.

*Rituxamab, just to be fair to our friends at FDA, was approved for marketing after a single Phase III and with a 326 patient safety database.

This just seems like Cowen totally bsing on some random idea he thought of. He devotes 1500 words on basically abolishing the FDA. He dares to be daring! This bs is pretty much the worst the blogosphere has to offer. You know why? Because it sounds exactly what we have come to expect from mainstream pundits. Random people sounding off on big ideas without much thought.

(Yes, I know Cowen is economist, but his thought process on this one seems scarily close to: "I love markets! Let's apply it to the FDA! Wheeeeeeeeee!"

50% of the bloggers who call themselves libertarians are drivelling fools, a further 20-25% are rightwing power-worshippers faking it. And most of the rest are only provisionally excluded from those two categories until they say something incredibly foolish or evil. Jim Henley is exhibit A - every so often he or one of his cobloggers says something so bizarre I have to stop and remind myself that if it wasn't for Bush, I wouldn't agree with him on anything whatsoever.

I'm technically a left-libertarian, which is like an anarchist with the crazy turned down, and there are only about three of us.

Oops, I was drunk when I posted saying that the gov't should get the money. Really, victims should get complete compensatory damages, and then the punitive damages (which are there essentially because we're risk averse, so the externality is greater than the direct cost of the bad drug) should be divided equally among everybody.

"Everybody" meaning everybody affected by the lawsuit? Or everybody in the country, like Alaskans getting a share of the oil revenue?

11 -- So long as lawyers get a really big cut, it doesn't matter. More money for lawyers ought to be the goal of all public policy.

7: Sadly, I was paraphrasing the comments over at Cowen's: research yourself! (When did all these businessmen pass organic chemistry?) Just don't be an early adopter! It may be a dumb approach, but it's not my fault they were giving dumb arguments.

And it's interesting to note that the argument undermines itself: we need no regulation so that drugs come to the market faster, but then, as wise consumers, we will not buy the drugs until there's been enough testers to ensure its safety.

And there's a few more problems, too. Is Merck likely to recall Vioxx over a handful of heart attacks without the pressure from the FDA?

But onto the better arguments. It's sort of speculative business to say that had a drug been released earlier, X number of lives wouuld have been saved, but it seems plausible enough as long as we're not pinning it down to specific numbers. But that's not an argument for deregulating drugs that aren't saving lives; that's just an argument for expanding the accelerated track, or allowing terminal patients to opt-in to taking drugs that are 'approvable' but not yet 'approved.'

I've always thought libertarians are idiots, including Tyler Cowen who some people seem to respect, but the libertarians seem determined to convince more people than just me. There apparent dream is for everyone in the world to know that they're idiots.

This guy has an econ PhD from Harvard. What does that say about economics as a science?

The slimy part is that presumably Cowen has other things ready to go about tort reform which he would pull out if this particular idea of his went through. The goal is no regulation and no lawsuits. Let's get the jackbooted, parasitical Orc thugs of the robber-baron State out of it entirely so that the cute, hobbitlike drug companies can peacefully go about their innocent lives.

They do that conditional thing a lot: "If your goal is X, A isn't the way to do it; B would be better." But then they oppose B if it comes up.

had a drug been released earlier, X number of lives wouuld have been saved

The obvious reply to this is yes, and similarly, had a drug which was never released due to complications found during testing been released without testig, X number of lives would have been lost.

Cowen is a smart guy. Has he never heard of, say, laetrile? Or, you know, the 19th century? Drug companies simply aren't going to do the amount of testing required under the current system if they aren't forced to -- my IRA took a whacking last year when Pfizer shut down its next-generation cholestorol drug, torceptrapib, in Phase III. I'd much rather see that happening in clinical trials then when hundreds of people start stroking out.

(Although there's something to be said for the idea that when people are suffering from fatal or incurable diseases, they should be permitted to take drugs that are out of Phase II on the "what the hell" theory; otherwise, you're leaving things to blind luck or political pull, like when Roy Cohn, the little boy nobody liked, got himself assigned to an AZT trial.)

Giving the payoff to the government absolutely doesn't work, because it just becomes part of their revenue stream. That's already happened with the tobacco settlements.

The whole pollution credits thing doesn't really work either. It might work for generic carbon pollution, but a chemical plant with a monopoly on some high-value per unit product might be best off buying a lot of credits and adjusting the price to cover, rather than completely revamping their production process. Especially since chemical pollution (as opposed to CO2) isn' usually dispersed, but hits a few downstream people with horrible results. (And as I said, The State will be tempted just to pocket the money and let the victims suffer, and with a little luck the company can Preserve Jobs by getting the cost of credits reduced.)

The combination of cheekiness, unrealism, and Social Darwinist meanness these guys have makes me more intemperate than usual when I happen to encounter them -- this happened often enough in my social set that I found myself going out less.

While I was there Taiwan had little or no regulation of medicine or pharmacy. One kid died of lead poisoning after taking a folk medicine containing (guess!) lead. One guy died after getting a penicillin shot from a doctor-masseuse-prostitute (not kidding). There's not much limit to how bad things could be.

One change I would support would be for the government to pay the costs of testing through the universities, with public health the motivator. The way it is now, the regulations favor deep-pocket companies with patentable products. But the direction of movement is for Big Pharma to take control of university science while manipulating the FDA.

Jesus Christ. Call this exhibit A for the proposition that no matter how smart they are, libertarians are really, really dumb much of the time. Even if we were to ignore all the problems mentioned above, and assume that a large company would be incentivised not to risk its survival on a dodgy drug, what the hell is there to stop a start up? The risk/reward equation shifts dramatically. If they're sued, so what? They haven't got much to lose.

Economics in the hands of ideologues can be used to support any ideology. I'm pretty sure I could write down an economic model in which no FDA results in no drug sales whatsoever.

First of all, having a phd from harvard doesn't make you a good economist. let's not use Cowen as some example that disproves all of economics. Second, the point about giving the settlement money to the gov't was not that it's fungible and would then become part of normal revenue. The point is that even economic theory essentially disproves the system he came up. I'm on your side, Emerson, jesus.

I don't understand what "buy approval" means. From the consumer? Like approval = market share? Or that there should be free competition for accreditation agencies, like the way there are several agencies that can certify you as a personal trainer?

Are Harvard PhDs not recognized by the profession? What are non-economists supposed to think when a PhD economist from a major school stands up and says something? It seems that economics is ill-defined in a way that physics is not. To my knowledge, Harvard physicists don't stand up and pull dumb shit out of their butts about physics-related topics.

My conclusion has been that economists are highly-skilled advocates, and that their PhDs are only authoritative within a very narrow part of technical economics. They have an undue importance in government and in the formation of public opinion.

Whenever I have this argument, I'm always assured that there's a silent majority of economic "dark matter" that I don't know about, and that the famous economists I know about, except for Krugman and DeLong, aren't real economists.

re: 9

There's at least four, since I suppose I'm one too.

There is no sense in which "famous economist" includes Tyler Cohen.

It's not just that Cowen isn't "famous." He's nobody. He's a guy with a blog, not even a respected economist. He publishes almost exclusively in libertarian journals that aren't accepted as part of the mainstream.

As to physics, you're right, we're not physicists. Let's note though that physicists are the ones who brought us the term "dark matter" because they can't find 90% of the universe. Then they added in "dark energy" too. Maybe economists can't agree and physicsts are monolithic in their views. But they certainly still pull insane shit out of their asses on a regular basis.

Let's note though that physicists are the ones who brought us the term "dark matter" because they can't find 90% of the universe.

I hope this is merely a failed attempt to be cheeky rather than your actual understanding of what dark matter is. Either way, no, you are not a physicist.

why don't you explain dark matter then. please, demonstrate my ignorance. if not being a physicist means i can't comment on physics, then the rest of you really should lay off economics.

Actually, never mind, don't explain. this isn't going anywhere. next subject.

I don't understand what "buy approval" means.

I believe the proposal was for something like replacing the FDA approval process, which involves the review of clinical and preclinical trial results etc. with the drug company simply filing a bond (and presumably some representation that the drug has been tested and is effective) in exchange for permission to sell their product. The purpose of the bond is that if someone sued the company over the drug and won, there would be a fund of money available to pay any judgment.

Being one of those stupid/evil/whatever (take your pick) conservative libertarians, I see the point of the proposal (without fully agreeing with it). The reallity of the FDA process is that while it benefits the public, it provide less benefit than you might think and imposes costs that arguably are not reasonable in light of the benefit. Specifically, the process imposes much less in terms of costs than opponents of FDA regulation suppose, but provide less, I believe in terms of benefits. I believe this is so because drug companies would incur a lot of the costs they already incur in terms of drug development and testing even if there were no FDA. Both medical ethics and the fear of lawsuits--a fear FDA approval does little to protect drug companies from, incidentally--mean that even if there were no FDA, the process for the vast majority of drug development and testing would not look singificantly different--preclinical identification of potential drugs, animal testing, and tightly controlled human testing of the tiny proportion of drugs that make it through preclinical testing. What would look different is that things would move faster and would cost a little less because it would eliminate the bureaucratic expense of doing things the FDA's way, preparing voluminous applications (back when they were delivered on paper (my experience is a bit dated, and I assume this is done on CD now) drug applications were often delivered by truck because they filled up dozens of boxes) and the time spent on approval--all of which increases the cost of drug development, making drugs more expensive and less available to consumers. And, of course, the crazy people on the low end selling snake oil--the people at whom a lot of the regulation was oringinally intended--would be free to sell their snake oil.

Thus, the costs of the FDA approval process are not as high as many argue, but neither are its benefits as great, except for keeping the snake oil salespersons of the world off of the street. I assume part of the idea of a bond is to keep the snakeoil sellers out of the market. The problem, of course, is that it keeps small start-ups out of the market, too. Cowan recognizes this, and implies a solution, which might be to allow a two-tiered system, which allows companies to choose to post a bond or to go through the approval process.

I think the idea that Cowen's idea replaces regulation with litigation is not exactly right. There already is litigation. And FDA approval--per se--does not do as much as you might think in protecting drug companies against suit. Thus, the fear of litigation--in addition to genuine ethical concerns and business concerns--already works to impose discipline on the drug development process, just as it would if there were no FDA. Certainly, though, if there were no FDA approval process, there likely would be more "regulation by lawsuit,"--just as there is in most other areas of life--I just think the extent to which it would occur is significantly overstated.

I do not think that the current drug regulation and approval system is that broken, so I see no reason for the proposed fix. But it might work.

(Idealist - when I went back to the shower thread later, I felt like I'd been unduly mean and wanted to apologize. Sorry about that.)

Thanks for the explanation.

Ian, at a minimum, economists have to aggressively change their image, because what I mostly see in public are conservatives and libertarians, usually, I would guess, Chicago school. And the things I read by Lazear or Greenspan aren't as loopy as Cowen, but they're still pretty hard-core right-wing.

re: 31

That's very kind. I--as I routinely am compelled to do--in turn apologize to you and the rest of the unfoggedtariat for sometimes being humorless and thin-skinned.

But is the public image of economics the result of economists, or the result of deliberate choices by the media? The most influential post-war economist was Paul Samuelson, who is a liberal. The most prominent post-war economist in the media was Milton Friedman, a libertarian. Is this a coincidence, do you suppose?

The bond proposal may address safety concerns, but does nothing to address efficacy concerns. Seriously ill people are desperate people, and unscrupulous types are more than happy to part them from their money.

Seriously ill people are desperate people, and unscrupulous types are more than happy to part them from their money.

True. So the empirical question are (1) whether getting rid of the FDA means that there will be no clinical testing, and thus no evidence of efficacy (as I argue above, I disagree that this would happen); (2) whether and to what extent doctors are likely to presecibe medicines when they have no idea whether they are effective and (3) whether the harm resulting from people taking safe but not effective medicine outweighs the benefit of people having access to more choices of medicines to take. I do not think the answers to these questions argue strongly against Cowen's idea, but they are, as I note, factual questions.

I would add that while alot of what I know about this issue has become hazy with the passage to time, I think that in some fields--oncology, for example--it is not that unusual for doctors to prescribe "off-label" (that is, for indications for which the drug is not approved) because the thinking is that if you have Stage IV cancer and the approved treatments are not working, you might as well try something else, as long as there is no reason to think it unsafe, since the alternative is no treatment at all.

A lot of those guys got Nobel prizes. Friedman did, Becker did. The libertarians are not a tiny minority.

I know that there are many economists whose ideas I might sympathize with, but the profession as a whole has a lot of highly-respected members who seem like bad guys to me. To me that enormously diminishes my trust of the profession as a whole.

Except for a very few, maybe Sawicky, economists are loyal to their profession even though the quality control isn't so great.

With terminal cancer, there are questions about legit medicine too. My father was an MD and died of a cancer he had diagnosed in patients several times (pancreatic), and he felt that his own doctors were unreasonably optimistic. He turned down the last round of treatments offered, as did my mother a decade later.

Off-label prescribing is not rare at all. If a drug has gotten through the safety testing and been approved for any condition at all, doctors trust their own judgment and anecdotal evidence to tell them which individual cases to prescribe it for. A lot of popular drugs are approved for some minor non-fatal condition and then get tried for all kinds of things, even becoming the standard treatment at some places with no actual evidence for it. (ESTROGEN ESTROGEN ESTROGEN ESTROGEN ESTROGEN)

One of my career goals is to be involved in corralling all this off-label prescribing into epidemiologically valuable arrangements that can actually teach us something on a non-anecdotal level.

He turned down the last round of treatments offered, as did my mother a decade later.

Often the most reasonable thing. And something more people and their families might be better off doing (my mother died of cancer before there were a lot of chemotherapy options; my father declined treatment when he was diagnosed because it was apparent that what was available would not extend his life much, and would make much of what he had left pretty miserable). But this is mostly a different issue--what treatment is reasonable in patients who are so sick that the question is only how many months can you squeeze out at what cost. This is a personal decision--although it also has huge medical costs. I would like to think that I will make my father's decision when the time comes, but who am I to tell someone who is dying how to make the decision on what a few more months of life--and the small chance of a lot more months of life--is worth. It becomes an issue for the rest of us only when the sick person expects someone else to pay--directly or indirectly--for their choice.

[insert universal healthcare debate here]

Sawicky is not an economist.

One of my career goals is to be involved in corralling all this off-label prescribing into epidemiologically valuable arrangements that can actually teach us something on a non-anecdotal level.

That is a hugely valuable and important thing to do. I hope you succeed.

"He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland/College Park."

You're not strengthening your argument, Ian. How do you define "economist"?

Call me crazy, but doesn't the prevalence of lawsuits against Big Pharma suggest that, just maybe, Big Pharma isn't over-regulated?

sometimes being . . . thin-skinned.

You know, if you take small doses of arsenic and annoint yourself with vitamin E and cat piss, your skin will be thicker and glow with health.

Call me crazy, but doesn't the prevalence of lawsuits against Big Pharma suggest that, just maybe, Big Pharma isn't over-regulated?

OK. That's crazy. First, how have you determined the relative prevalence of lawsuits against drug companies? I'm not sure that, as a function of people who take pharmaceuticals or of revenue, drug companies are more likely to be sued by consumers. Maybe, but I've never heard that. A lot of drug company litigation is between companies over patents and such. With respect to personal injury lawsuits against drug companies, if true, it could prove that they are underregulated, or it could prove only that they are deep pocketed defendants who are unsympathetic to jurors, and thus the kind of defendants plaintiffs' lawyers love. How do you figure it proves a lack of sufficient regulation? What would sufficient regulation look like?

Neither Sawicky nor Cowen is in the mainstream. There are people with physics degrees who are also out of the mainstream. This is true of every sort of degree. There are real doctors who claim hiv doesn't cause aids, etc. In that sense, Sawicky isn't an economist.

At the end of the day, John, I think the issue is that I'm willing to tolerate some economists with tragic political views if I think that they're good economists. On the other hand, you seem to prefer people with whom we both probably have more in common politically, but who I don't see as having any standing whatsoever in the field (in the sense that they do not publish in mainstream refereed journals). I'm not sure that we can advance very far, and this isn't an argument I'd like to have today.

Well, I like Sawicky, so we're as bad off as when we started.

So far I'm right where I started: economists are like lawyers. They know a tremendous amount of stuff, but until you know where they're coming from, you can't trust them. And I don't think that the Nobel Prize winners can be trusted much more than the marginal folk.

Is there any reason to believe that Sawicky or Cowen is rejected by the field? As far as I can tell, once he's got his PhD, there's no licensing mechanism to say whether an econ PhD is legit or not. And I don't know of many wack physicists.

My way of determining whether an economist counts as mainstream is by looking at where they publish. Cowen has one paper in the American Economic Review (one of the top tier journals), and a bunch in the Journal of Austrian Economics, which does not count for anything.

As to Sawicky, I can't find evidence of him publishing anything, though I may not have looked hard enough. I used to read his blog a bit, and my recollection (though don't ask for any quotes) is that he said things that were decidedly out of the mainstream and that's why I stopped reading. I seem to recall him saying things along the lines of "the fed raises interest rates every time unemployment gets too low because they're trying to help big businesses." I can't think of anybody who I view as a respectable economist who would endorse that sort of thinking (DeLong and Krugman would definitely not agree with the sentiment). However, I may be getting Sawicky mixed up with Drum, who makes the same point constantly.

Are Greenspan, Lazear and Becker mainstream?

Becker and Lazear, certainly. Greenspan doesn't have much of a research history (I really have no idea where he came from). This is precisely my point, Lazear and Becker have both done some seriously good research and I can respect them even though I disagree with their policy views. Sawicky I cannot respect even though I probably agree with him on policy more often than not.

I think becker and Lazear are wrong, but at least I find them coherent. Sawicky is right, but for (if memory serves) what I think are incoherent reasons.

Libertarians are almost certainly overrepresented in economics, for the obvious reason that if you think the free market is magic you're more likely to find the study of markets desireable. Some of those libertarians made large contributions to the field, large enough to win the Nobel. (Here's four others: Coase, Hayek, Lucas, and Prescott.) Libertarianism certainly is not outside the mainstream of economics. The right wing of mainstream economics goes a lot further than the right wing of sociology, and the left wing is a lot shorter.

But economists are not _all_ libertarians, and many influential mainstream economic ideas point away from the perfection of markets. So why do the market perfection people have such a high profile? I think it's the confluence of two factors. One is that libertarian economists really are skillful advocates for a certain ideology, while the rest of the mainstream is not nearly so committed to an alternative. The other is that there is an established system by which conservative voices are inserted into the national dialogue. Milton Friedman really did make major contributions to economics, but at the same time he was the beneficiary of the conservative political machine, which found it useful to build him up the rival to Keynes. So if you see an economist in the public sphere, he may very well be a skillful advocate for a particular ideology, but this is not a natural outcome of the center of gravity of economics as a field.

At this point the rightward / libertarian bias of the public face of economics is great enough that I don't trust economists when I hear them speak and have doubts about the profession as a whole. If I am wrong about where the center of gravity of the profession is, the profession probably ought to get on the stick about changing their image. DeLong and Krugman are political centrists, and as far as I know they're at the left wing of the orthodox profession.

Orthodoxy and rank in the profession are two different things, though. Someone might not be a published research economist and still be competent and orthodox -- just not original or productive.

I guess I don't think tht the majority of economics, in terms of what's written in journals, is really normative. Economists make normative claims, but research is generally expected to be positive and descriptive. So placing it on the political spectrum is difficult.

Now I realize that Milton Friedman made many normative statements in his life, but if you read his serious research papers -- the stuff that first brought him respect -- it's not normative. Papers on lifetime consumption or on the velocity theory of money aren't libertarian, they're just research papers.

It's normative in what it leaves out. The fact that the normativity is not explicitly stated is just presentation. For instance, one major economist (Mankiw, I think) just said offhand that he had no interest in questions of distribution or equality. By and large, economists have been slow to respond to environmental questions.

It's absolutely wrong that economists ignores distribution and inequality. Some of my own work has been about inequality, see Andy Card, Alan Krueger, Larry Katz, Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, Claudia Goldin, Robert Margo, and a raft of other people that I couldn't think of off the top of my head. Those are big names too -- Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, etc. Greg Mankiw doesn't do stuff on the income distribution, but a lot of others certainly do.

Joe stiglitz won a nobel for showing when markets don't work. Labor economists have shown us how minimum wages may raise overall wages and leave employment unaffected, they've shown why unions may be good. These are not right wing topics. What's the major topic that economics ignores? It's not inequality, I can tell you that for sure.

54 sounds right to me.

As to Sawicky, I can't find evidence of him publishing anything, though I may not have looked hard enough.

There's one in JSTOR:

Fuller, Hage, Garnier and Sawicky, Nation Building and School Expansion Under the Fragile French State (1992), Social Forces 70:923).

Searching other databases I have access to, I find citations from Social Policy (2), Dissent (1), Education Digest (1), Challenge (6), WorkingUSA (3), Review of Radical Political Economics (1), and New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations (1), as well as two Economic Policy Institute briefing papers, and pieces in the Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, The American Prospect, and Business Week.

Here's the cv, which includes a huge number of newspaper and magazine articles and conference presentations: http://maxspeak.org/who/cv.html

It sort of depends on what you mean by the words "publishing" and "anything".

Note: I know nothing about economic journals so the previous post should not be interpreted as attempting to prove anything.

Andy Card? He isn't well-calculated to convince me that economics isn't right wing. He also doesn't seem to be an economist. Are there two?

Having only read stuff about the Russia scandal, I'm curious about the status of Andrei Schleifer's work (particularly on corruption) within the profession. Or is that a loaded question? I'm actually genuinely curious.

Contrary to the rumors, Nobelists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were not convicted of felonies. It was a civil case.

52 - He was a consulting economist, doing macro-level predictions for big companies, investment banks, etc. Also, I think he was trying to get into Ayn Rand's pants, but I may be off slightly on the details there.

Heebie, I had a dream last night where you were sending me and rfts emails very earnestly trying to explain something about aliens. (Maybe they had contacted you and you were trying to tip off the Unfogged regulars before they blew shit up? It's fuzzy now.)

Two things

First, tI'm an idiot. Not andy card -- david card. doesn't work in the white house.

Second, Andrei Schleifer is well respected within the profession for his work (you don't get a job at Harvard for nothing). I don't know enough about anything else to comment on it. David Warsh has written a bit about what economists think of Schleifer. I've never really done much work in the area Andrei is in, but some people I think very very highly of say he's brilliant.

Yeah, I'm right that Greenspan was part of the Rand circle in the '50s. (Also, he apparently joined the Nixon campaign after being tapped Leonard Garment, a law partner of Nixon's, who knew Greenspan from their days as saxophonists. Man, the world is strange.)

Is the distorted public image of economics at all unusual? Consider that NYT hit piece on Gore from last week. Climatologists have a level of agreement on global warming that economists lack on every subject except maybe the desireability of money versus barter. Yet the Times managed to look like there was a legitimate pushback against Gore.

In economics, though, you can get econ PhDs to make the noise. Very few of the global warming skeptics are climatologists.

Policy questions seem pretty central to econ, and econ has an enormous influence in policymaking, which makes you think that it should be normative if it isn't. There seems to be this tug of war between trying to keep economics pure and trying to making it relevant, but once it's relevant the scientific consensus seems less, and the purity of the science is used as a big arguing point at the very moment that it's being lost.

I googled Lazear, since I don't know anything about him, and I found his essay "Economic Imperialism", which is the one of the most deluded essays by an economist that I've ever seen. It's Becker-esque.

Schleifer's work definitely puts him in the "markets don't always work" school of thought. I suppose he proved that empirically through the time he spent in Russia.

I was thinking of that piece of his. I believe he's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers now.

Wow. You don't even need to make an argument. Just make people read that essay, cross your arms, and say "I rest my case." I'd sign up for an anti-economist pogrom right about now.

Meh. I'm not a big fan of the whole economic imperialism thing, but I think there is a point to be made that economics does some things better than, say, anthropology. But they do some things better than us.

I don't exactly see how that essay makes economics inherently a right wing enterprise. John, you still have yet to give an example of something that economists don't study that shows how we're all conservatives.

Also, I'm not sure why the fact that economists sometimes make strong claims about the power of our methods makes us wrong about everything or necessarily right wing.

71 - Sadly, John has already conceded that economists are not all conservatives. Anyway, that essay does something much worse: it makes economists sound like loons. I think this is something that would be hard to see from within the field, since Lazear expresses an extreme form of how economists view themselves.

I really don't say economists are all conservatives. The public face of economics tends to be pretty conservative, and it only slightly misrepresents the field if DeLong is at the far left of the mainstream economists, while a lot of respected and honored economists are very far right.

Since I was young economists have been trying to take into account things that were pretty well ignored or externalized when I first studied -- the environment, the family, local community, social equality questions -- but these aspects they seem like add-on patches and the economists' discussions of the family and the environment still seem pretty bad.

Becker strikes me as an unpleasant sort of madman, for example, as do most of the libertarians. I would be very uncomfortable being part of a profession in which he was so highly honored, but the liberal economists I talk to not only do not feel uncomfortable, but are resentful that I suggest that they should.

Economics is just inherently rightwing/libertarian though. What does the study area have do with it.

We're right back where we started. I can see why you don't like Becker, I just happen to disagree. For different reasons, I find Sawicky extremely unpleasant.

I realize that you don't think all economists are conservatives, but the claim that the academic/scientific part has a rightward normative bent ("It's normative in what it leaves out") has been unsupported.

Are you saying that economics doesn't have a rightward bent? Or do you just want me to debate you?

Are you saying that Becker isn't right wing?

I'm saying economics doesn't have a rightward bent. I'm saying that Gary Becker can have whatever personal views he wants, but that doesn't have anything to do with his research on human capital or theories about the allocation of time. He can make public statements saying George Bush is the messiah if he wants, but that doesn't give economics a rightward bent.

I don't particularly care if you debate me or not, but I'd probably prefer not. this clearly isn't going anywhere.

Nope, it isn't. And I don't believe for a minute that economics is non-normative, or that the "personal political opinions" of economists are irrelevant (considering their eagerness to give policy advice), and I strongly doubt that economics is as scientific as is claimed, granted the degree of differences within the profession. You don't have schools of physics. There are a few far-out areas of research where there's disagreement and debate, but these are acknowledged to be areas where the problems haven't been solved.

I'm enjoying the discussion, though admittedly I'm procrastinating on writing a computer program...

ok.

Left-wing economics is like right-wing rock-and-roll - the political beliefs involvled prevent the development of the craft to high levels by ruling out effective approaches.

Left-wing economics is like right-wing rock-and-roll - the political beliefs involvled prevent the development of the craft to high levels by ruling out effective approaches.

I agree with the descriptive statement that there is not a wealth of right-wing rock-and-rollers, but as a right-winger who loves rock music, I object to the notion that rock-and-roll and conservatism are incompatible. I mean, you could picture Jerry Garcia as a libertarian, right? I bet Emerson and I feel the same nostalgia for our disaffected childhoods when we hear Satisfaction. Come on, we let you guys have the media and academia, you can't have rock, too.

Satisfaction leads to communist revolution, and thence, to the Gulag.

Satisfaction leads to communist revolution, and thence, to the Gulag.

Well, we all get satisfaction in our own way. But the song made Mick Jagger and his band-mates deservedly rich because it is one of the best rock and roll songs ever played.

83: Jerry Garcia is a libertarian in the sense that libertarians are not in all ways right wing. I mean, I'm a right-winger, and I like rock, but it sure seems like making good rock requires a combination of giving the finger to the man, at least moderate drug use, indulging in selfish and wholly unrealistic fantasies, and living in more or less abject poverty while driving from one shitty venue to another in a beat up old van. Notably absent from the list are getting an education that will be valuable in your future, getting a haircut, and getting a real job, all of which seemed like more eminently sensible ideas.

I mean... go listen to "Get A Haircut." Tell me that's right wing. It's good rock, though.

I'm somewhat disturbed that I responded with a straight face to the suggestion that Jerry Garcia is a counter-example to "there's no good right wing rock." Cumberland Blues? Friend of the Devil? Hmm?

Jerry Garcia, Alan Ginsberg, Lou Reed, and Frank Zappa all played some role in the East European dissident movements.

To be clear, I was not making a strong claim regarding Garcia's politics, I was just saying that one could imagine a world in which he was a libertarian. Giving the finger to the man is not very consistent with love of government intervention, much less state ownership of the means of production.

Jerry Garcia, Alan Ginsberg, Lou Reed, and Frank Zappa all played some role in the East European dissident movements.

There you go! Of those four, aren't all but Reed now dead? I see the Stasi's hand in this.

When did you permanently become Walt Someguy McManlypants instead of Robust? I miss Robust.

Reed's clean living made him unkillable, like Rasputin and keith Richard.

This is Robusto's cousin, no?

I'm someone completely different. It was a joke that arose on the thread of LB's that all of the one-name men should be assigned last names. I'm sorry if I confused anyone. I'll drop it now.

I'm actually his father. But perhaps I've said too much.

Thanks. It was the McManlypants that confused me. I'm easily confused, tho.

Now he has to kill you, Dad, not that he wouldn't have anyway.

Guys, why would you assume any politics from Garcia? Hunter wrote the words.

I did hear Jerry ad lib once (intentionally -- I heard him mess up the words plenty). On US Blues instead of 'shake the hand that shook the hand of PT Barnum and Charlie Chan' he sang 'shake the hand that shook the hand of PT Barnum and the Shah of Iran.' It was January 1980.

Am I understanding correctly that Robust McManlypants will be posting henceforth under the pseudonym "Walt Someguy"?

Cushla Mochree!

Cite, I think. It was a benefit for genocide victims in Cambodia (Kampuchea, as we then called it). Nothing to do with the Shah, obviously.

The Deadheads I've known have tended to be libertarians, if anything, but not free market fanatics, and a bit too anti-intellectual and smartass to be much of anything.

I

I

Are you still with us, John?

The Deadheads tried to abduct me, but I fought them off.

About 5 years ago I was a housemate in what turned out to be a Deadhead house, and it was an experience.

About 5 years ago

It's hard for me to imagine how people can be real Deadheads at this point. What's Christianity without communion?

I defy the analogy ban.

I have a better one, though. Imagine a bunch of guys who share a house, have a humongous TV, and watch ski racing all the time. And never ski.

And consider themselves skiers.

You did well to escape those poor deluded heretics, John.

These people were definitely performing their sacrament. Their identification with the band wasn't the main thing, but more the ethos. There were lots of problems, such as depression, dependency, codependency, and obligatory cheerfulness and fun.

99 - Robusto will be posting as Robusto. I will be posting as Walt, at least until he kills me, as he must. That's how we have always done things in Clan McManlyPants. It's all part of the circle of life.

I think reading between the lines John is now a housemate in an economist house, and that one of his roommates is Gary Becker.

These people were definitely performing their sacrament.

They danced with full-on abandon, for at least two one hour long blocks per day?

108 -- It never occured to me until this very moment that I stopped going to Grateful Dead concerts when (just a few months before) I got a degree in Economics.

No, they smoked dope all the time. Many did go to shows.

Ann Coulter is a Deadhead.

indulging in selfish and wholly unrealistic fantasies,

Is this supposed to be incompatible with libertarianism?

"As to physics, you're right, we're not physicists. Let's note though that physicists are the ones who brought us the term "dark matter" because they can't find 90% of the universe. Then they added in "dark energy" too. Maybe economists can't agree and physicsts are monolithic in their views. But they certainly still pull insane shit out of their asses on a regular basis."

Dark matter isn't insane shit, at least not any more than quantum mechanics or relativity. It's an attempt to explain why galaxies don't disintegrate,when our current understanding of gravity says they shouldn't. Similarly dark energy explains why the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. Physicists freely admit that these are placeholder terms, and that it's more than likely it's our models of gravity that are wrong. After all, we can't even reconcile the quantum and relativity models we have now. But the point is that until you can come up with a better model that explains these macro level observations and all the stuff that the conventional models account for with extraordinary levels of accuracy, dark matter and dark energy are the best we have.

Also, if you take a particular instrumental line on the existence of unobservables, there's nothing more to the existence of dark matter than the fact that it plays a particular placeholder role in a theory -- in this respect dark matter is like everything else and not 'insane' at all.

I'm saying that Gary Becker can have whatever personal views he wants, but that doesn't have anything to do with his research on human capital or theories about the allocation of time.

You are NOT serious. Surely? You don't think his "altruistic patriarch" (or whatever he actually called it) method of modelling household decision making reflected any kind of political bias? I mean, this is only one example, it happens to be one I'm familiar with, but effectively assuming away female subjectivity in your economic modeling is not politically neutral behaviour-- also the actual data doesn't back it up as a good assumption. Not denying his brilliance, but it's ludicrous to claim his work isn't affected by his politics.

anyway. I think this thread probably died ages ago but I was sufficiently outraged by this to jump in-- I was basically on your side in the argument right up until that comment though.