Economics -ist

SEE TWO2 22

see libtard cap

SEE ECONOMY GNP

l free mkt bs

see CTT risk asses cost-benefit

see pundits/ fox

see supply side voodoo tax cuts

see cash for economists NERA CONSULT

austerity 2 santas

capt 619 bak

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AN 9 26

President Donald Trump's economic policies, especially tariffs, are drawing strong criticism on both the left and the right, from liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to conservative and libertarian economists known for their admiration for the late Milton Friedman (who viewed steep tariffs as terrible for both businesses and consumers). But according to The New Republic's Michael Tomasky, the GOP's problems with economics go way beyond Trump himself.

Tomasky, in a Monday morning article, argues that Republicans in general are failing to understand key economic concepts.

Tomasky recalls that during his 2024 campaign, Trump promised, "Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half … We are going to bring energy down by 50 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent within 12 months from January 20, which is the day we go into office."

According to Tomasky, those promises are "relevant to us today on two levels."

"The first is the more obvious: He was lying out his know-you-what without any regard for whether these words would end up being true," Tomasky writes. "They just sounded good at the time, so he said them. Fifty percent in a year … The second level is more interesting — and more damning not only of Trump, but of the entire Republican Party and of conservatism generally, in this country and across the world, and not just in Trump's second term, but for all time.

And that is this: There is probably some way in which Trump actually believed he could lower energy prices — maybe not by 50 percent in a year, but lower them substantially and noticeably. Why would he believe this? He believed it because conservatives believe stupid, simplistic things about how the capitalist economy works."

Tomasky continues, "They believe that if you just let the free market do its thing, wonders will arise and all will be well. They believe this first and foremost because their big-money donors believe it. But they also believe it because the economists — or more precisely, the economists they prefer to listen to — say so, and they must know what they're talking about."

According to Tomasky, a "new generation of economists … have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct" and now realize that "sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends."

"In the midterm campaign," Tomasky writes, "Democrats are understandably focused on attacking Trump for his lies and making these higher prices we're paying all about him. That makes political sense … But longer term, the Democrats need to do much more. It would be great if they nominated a presidential candidate in 2028 who had the guts and the rhetorical skill to indict not just Trump, but conservatism and traditional economics more generally. It's not an accident that the last three, now four, GOP presidents have wrecked the economy: Bush, Bush, Trump, and Trump."

White House panic skyrockets as Trump triggers death spiral economy

Republicans fume as Trump breaks his own abysmal economic record

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2 26

thug shd be disciplined

acad econ suppress?! hasset

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AN 10 25

Conservative economist and Independent Institute senior fellow Phillip W. Magness slammed the irony of President Donald Trump promising a Great Depression while advocating for one of the Great Depression’s chief causes.

If the courts neuter Trump’s unilateral tariffs on U.S. trading partners, the president is already considering an alternative method to keep the tariffs underway.

“One alternative the administration apparently is considering turning to is the discredited and effectively repealed Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which turned an economic downturn into a decade-long catastrophe,” said Magness.

Magness said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted Trump’s ‘Plan B’ involves resurrecting his tariff agenda with an obscure clause of this 95-year-old law known as Section 338.

“Section 338 did not work as intended, as Smoot-Hawley triggered a catastrophic global trade war that brought international commerce to a halt, destroyed the U.S. export market, and thrust us deeper into the Great Depression,” said Magness.”

IFrame Content

The stock market collapsed in 1929, heralding the beginning of the depression. But Magness said it became “Great” thanks to three “interventionist” blunders, one of which included the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, designed as a relief measure intended to “insulate American producers from turmoil on international markets and ‘stimulate’ them with the benefit of tariff protection.”

Instead, the Act triggered what Magness called a “lobbyist-driven free-for-all” as industries “clamored for favorable rates and special interest groups bribed their way onto the tariff schedule.”

“Our major trading partners retaliated by targeting American exports, which included the already beleaguered agricultural sector. U.S. exports dropped by 61 percent between 1930 and 1933, showing what economists had long predicted: attempts to insulate the country from foreign import competition affect the entire economy and ultimately hurt domestic industries as well,” Magness said.

Congress soon realized its error and passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which authorized the panicking president to lower tariff rates by up to 50 percent by negotiating reciprocal concessions from other countries.

“The American economy is already slowing, warned Magness, “and our allies are deepening their commercial relationships with our enemies.”

“Until the Trump administration’s novel legal theories came along, Section 338 was long considered a dead letter — buried in shame with the rest of Smoot-Hawley’s economic legacy,” said Magness. “… One might have hoped that Smoot-Hawley’s inauspicious history would preclude the White House from turning to it, but apparently that’s not the case.”

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bad econ trinity trump (heritage demint?)

omg trio consistently, spectacularly and devastatingly WRONG! punditry at worst/lethal

jon chait

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/arthur-laffer-lawrence-kudlow-stephen-moore-public-health.html

no lnx

THE NATIONAL INTEREST APR. 25, 2020

The Fatal Calculations of the Economists Steering Our Public Health

By Jonathan Chait

One night in late March, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole — one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have a particular competence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican officials to ignore experts.

Even before his current role, Laffer was perhaps the most successful policy entrepreneur in modern American history, at least if measured by political influence.In the 1970s, as an economics professor who had served in Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, Laffer developed a friendship with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had previously included defending Richard Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal. The two came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding insight with world-historical ramifications. A tax rate of either zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, sideways curve between those points, he further hypothesized that reducing tax rates might increase revenue.

The “Laffer curve,” which at one point Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian now claims to display the original), formed the basis of what became known as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine held not only that tax cuts could increase tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates were the primary driver of all economic events. Republican economist Herb Stein coined the name as a term of derision, intending to highlight the absurdity of building a model entirely on one side of the economy instead of considering both supply and demand. Economic experts mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in tax rates at existing levels could produce anywhere close to enough new economic growth to pay for itself.

And the experts … were completely right. After supply-siders converted Ronald Reagan and promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves, revenue hemorrhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax increases for the purpose of “reducing the size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his budget director later admitted. When Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted he would kill the recovery and reduce tax revenue. Instead, revenue soared far higher than anybody had forecast.

Kudlow and Moore began ascending in the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing think tanks and media — especially the Journal editorial page, which remained the high temple of the supply-side cult. I first came across Moore when he was writing Journal columns arguing that the supply-siders had been right to predict Bill Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue. (A hallmark of supply-side thought has been to refuse to concede any error or complication in its analysis.) The supply-siders went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would produce untold prosperity. Moore wrote a book called Bullish on Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to The Bush Boom and a series of columns dismissing “pessimistas” who detected economic turmoil. “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he wrote in December 2007.

In the spring of 2016, just after Trump had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kudlow, and Moore set out to meet the candidate at Trump Tower. Like many members of the conservative elite, they initially harbored reservations. But unlike foreign-policy hawks or social traditionalists, their concerns were devoid of any moral component, like a suspicion of dictators or philanderers. Their sole misgiving concerned Trump’s populist rhetoric and occasional campaign vows to raise his own taxes. The troika wanted to find out if he really meant it. To their relief, he didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” Kudlow recounted in the foreword to Laffer and Moore’s laudatory book, Trumponomics. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”

We’ll come out of this soon, the economy will reopen, the economy will restart. It will, I hope, take care of itself. Markets will take care of themselves over time.

— Larry Kudlow, optimistic as oil prices tanked, on April 22

Kudlow joined the administration as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump announced he would nominate Moore for the Federal Reserve Board, but the Senate killed Moore’s bid over a combination of embarrassing ignorance of the subject — just two years before, he’d admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on monetary policy” — and years of sexist comments, including an obsessive hatred of women working as play-by-play commentators on basketball games. He and Laffer instead served as outside advisers and allies to Trump, who last summer bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer.

Trump rewarded their confidence by implementing a large corporate tax cut, which was intended to encourage more corporate investment and therefore “would yield about the same revenue — and possibly more — than the current system,” Laffer and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Naturally, it failed. Business owners got a windfall, but there was no corporate-investment boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by more than a third. Just as naturally, they acted as if events had proved them right.

And so, when the coronavirus struck, Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists who would not hesitate to question legitimate experts.Kudlow forcefully endorsed Trump’s optimism that the virus would never spread. On February 25, Kudlow said it had been “contained … pretty close to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was insisting, “I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”

When public-health officials persuaded Trump to abandon his denialism, the supply-siders formed the resistance. Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” they reasoned that the problem facing the economy was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad incentives imposed by government — in this case, restrictions on business and excessively generous unemployment benefits that “discourage work.” If the government just stopped suppressing incentives, the economy would spring back to life.

The Journal editorial page published some of the first pushback against the wisdom of lockdowns. As early as mid-March, Moore denounced on Fox News the first closings, in California, as “a very dangerous, almost Orwellian situation.” Trump began repeating the supply-siders’ warnings that he had ceded too much authority to scientists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he mused, “they might say shut down the entire world”). Trump relented to his public-health experts but, by early April, was again listening to the supply-siders. Moore began proposing May 1 as a deadline to reopen the economy, a timeline Trump endorsed soon thereafter.

The supply-siders’ struggle to tug Trump away from his medical experts has both public and private facets. Laffer and Moore promoted a new administration task force to focus on economic reopening, a counterweight to the coronavirus task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged anti-shutdown protests in several states to pressure governors to speed up their timetables for reopening businesses. “I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” he explained, “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”

In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.” The message today is largely unchanged. The main difference is that the experts they are urging the president to dismiss are counting lives. We’re the beans.

This article appears in the April 27, 2020, issue of New York Magazine

MUSK RETWEET KILLED RESCUE BILL?

OFF BS

Richard Stern is the Director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage, Stern was a Congressional staffer for over seven years. During that time, he served as a policy staffer for the Republican Study Committee, where he was the staff lead for their Budget and Spending task force and spearheaded their work to create their FY 2020 and FY 2022 federal budgets. He also served as Legislative Director for Representative Tom McClintock of California and was a Legislative Assistant for former Representative Steve King of Iowa. Stern is a graduate of Emory University and holds a bachelor of arts in Economics.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html

nyt

heritage, demint dunlop:

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessionsand many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

“Feulner’s first law is people are policy,”Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the newly appointed director of Trump’s National Economic Council, the television personalityLarry Kudlow— another name on Heritage’s Project to Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper into his club chair: “First, you have to have the right people.”

...

While Feulner and his senior staff had reserved the right to review policy papers, they generally avoided intervening in the research and publication process. DeMint and his leadership team were much more aggressive. Papers were heavily edited or even withheld from release altogether. Several scholars quit. DeMint replaced them, bringing in as Heritage’s chief economist Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a founder of the Club for Growth, a lobbying group that advocates cutting taxes.

...

The turnover rates have also been historic. In March, The New York Times reported that nine of the top 21 White House and cabinet positions have been emptied and refilled at least once; neither Obama nor Bush had lost a single cabinet member by that point in their administrations. Since taking office, Trump has replaced more than half of his 65 most influential advisers, according to a tracker created by the Brookings Institution. Christie recently laid the blame for the turnover on what he described as a “brutally unprofessional” transition, saying that proper vetting would have caught a lot of Trump’s most problematic appointees. A number of other senior advisers seem to be on shaky ground with the president, and an exodus is anticipated after the November midterm elections.

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence to support Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.

In a sense, the transition is still going, and as long as Trump remains in office it may never end. “I get calls from people every day who still want to go in,” Dunlop told me. “Or I’ll hear from the White House, or I’ll run into someone at a reception or over coffee, and I’ll say, ‘I’ve got a name for you. I’ll send it along.’ ”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/to-us-oligarchs-majority-views-on-taxing-the-rich-count-for-little/

noah b

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent.

At some point, corruption stops being a bug in democracy and starts becoming a feature of oligarchy.

Has the US passed that threshold?

Based on the sweeping and effective resistance to commonsense solutions to reign in wealthy tax scofflaws, the answer is not encouraging.

Since the 1970s, the United States has become steadily and inexorably more economically unequal. According to Pew, upper income families have brought in a larger and larger share of total income.

US income inequality is the highest of all G7 nations. Its Gini coefficient is .434, well above second highest UK at .392.

In 1968, the top 20 percent of households earned 43 percent of national income. By 2018, the top 20 percent of households earned 52 percent.

In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second poorest income tier. In 2016, they had 248times as much wealth.

In 2020, the 50 richest Americans had almost as much wealth as the poorest half of the US population.

This massive concentration of wealth is also a massive concentration of power. The wealthiest people have access to the best lawyers, the best tax attorneys and the most powerful politicians.

That means that it is very difficult for the government to restrain them, or to create a more equitable economy and society against their wishes.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth. [amp fdbk]

An example of oligarchical power is billionaire tax evasion. A recent IRS study found that wealthy Americans conceal more than 20 percent of their earnings. They are able to do this because of complex accounting scams involving offshore tax shelters.

The lost tax costs the government at least $175 billion a year in revenue. The top 1 percent of earners are responsible for a third of unpaid federal taxes.

In addition to these straightforwardly illegal accounting tricks, the very wealthy also benefit from at least nominally legal loopholes.

For instance, wealthy people have many assets that increase in value over time, but they do not pay taxes on those assets until they sell them.

They can borrow against those assets without paying taxes, since again the assets aren’t considered income. Then, if they die before selling the assets, they can pass them on to their heirs using trusts and other accounting shenanigans to avoid the estate tax.

ProPublica called this strategy Buy, Borrow, Die. It’s a key method for hoarding generational wealth, and entrenching oligarchy.

The Biden administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, have proposed strong measures to rein in billionaire corruption. In part, they want to restrain inequality. In part, they hope to fund other priorities like climate mitigation and anti-poverty measures in the administration’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan.

To address billionaire tax evasion, BBB included $80 billion to boost capacity and staff at the IRS. That would help make up for the steady budget-cuts under Republican administrations. Those have led to a 60 percent decrease in audits of taxpayers who earn more than $1 million. Biden said the investment would allow the IRS to collect $400 billion in taxes.

Biden, Yellen and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden have also been pushing for a billionaire tax to force the very wealthy to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets.

This would strike at the heart of the oligarchic “Buy, Borrow, Die” lifestyle. It would force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, like everyone else, every year, year after year.

Policies that prevent the rich from escaping a tax burden everyone has to pay should be easy to pass in a democracy. You’d think preventing billionaires from cheating on their taxes would be a popular policy.

And you’d be correct.

A 2019 poll, for example, showed that 76 percent of Americans agreed that the wealthiest should pay more in taxes. Proposals to tax income over $10 million at 70 percent — a huge increase over current rates — obtained more than 50 percent support.

In an oligarchy, though, public support doesn’t necessarily count for all that much.

A notorious 2015 study found that politicians were much more likely to listen to and follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of the less affluent.

You can see that playing out in the politics of billionaire taxation.

Build Back Better, which included the beefed-up IRS funding, was scuttled by millionaire West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, in large part, reportedly, because he was worried that poor parents would spend money on drugs.

A wealthy politician refused to enforce the law against billionaires because he was worried that poor people are natural criminals.

That is what you call class consciousness.

Wyden’s proposal to end “Buy, Borrow, Die” also failed after opposition from Manchin.It was of course opposed by Senate Republicans, whose main goal is to shovel as much money as possible to the rich in as short a time as possible.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent. This would make it harder for businesses to escape tax burdens by moving their corporate offices. Congress still has to pass the treaty, but Yellen said she was confident they would do so.

The corporate minimum tax is a substantial achievement. But it’s also a small dam erected against the tsunami of inequality in the US.

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

The wealthy have been expanding their power and influence for decades in the US. The result is that the US regularly chooses to make the rich richer rather than helping the poorest feed their children.

The outlook for change is likely to be even bleaker if Republicans recapture one or both legislative chambers in November.

Yellen and Biden are to be commended for fighting an ongoing rearguard action against corruption. But if government inability to restrain corruption is a feature of oligarchy, then the US is already well down a path that it is very difficult to retrace.

621 aha // to deficit bogeyman to prevent spending $ on ppl, infra, social safety net. educ see 2 santas BS

very long

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cash_for_Comments_Economists_Network

The Cash for Comments network of 127 (in total over ten years) American Professors of Economics (with a few law and business professors), was one of the most successful, and long-lasting of all the scams run by the tobacco industry. It was the brain-child of Professor Robert D. Tollison at George Mason University's libertarian think-tank, the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC), and James M Savarese of Ogilvy & Mather Public Relations.

Savarese later took the lobbying operation out of O&M and ran it through his own private lobbying company James Savarese & Associates with a skeleton staff -- and in partnership with Tollison and his wife Anna Tollison. Later Savarese turned up, once again, as a key lobbyist with Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart, so clearly this had always been a surreptitious O&M operation - kept at arms length and legally separated from that large company - probably for legal reasons.

Essentially, Savarese and Tollison recruited as network members at least one Professor of Economics in each State University (they were poorly paid and welcomed the chance to make money on the side). He used his list of members and associates within the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Public Choice Society which he jointly controlled with Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan at George Mason University.

The foundation document of this network was a memo "Excise Tax Speaking Forums" sent by Ogilvy & Mather to FredPanzer at the Tobacco Instituteon the 20th November 1984 [2]. It refers to a forum sponsored by the Public Choice Society to be held in New Orleans (Feb 21-23 1985) which had four core-group network speakers on a major panel, which was being organised for the tobacco industry by Tollison and Savarese. This early manifestation came to be called the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth.

Public Choice Libertarian ideology

'Public Choice Economics' in the context of the day, was a catch-phrase meaning "free-markets, less government, reduced regulation" of goods and services. It was the ultra-libertarian economic ideology of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher which was followed (as much as he was capable of understanding it) by President Ronald Reagan in the USA. It's main emphasis was on deregulation of industries -- even those with poisoning and polluting proplems - and in Reagan's case it led to major scandals with the forced retirement of over 20 top staff from the EPA, and the hurried exit ofThorne Auchter as head of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and his (later) lobbying partner J:{ames J Tozzias the administration's "Deregulation Czar" }:(Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs - OIRA/OMB).

Payment system

The tobacco industry paid no retainer fees to the general Cash-for-Comment network members. However they did retain some of the core network and paid higher fees to a half-dozen of the Society economist recruited as part of the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth. Network members were employed purely on pay-for-service transactions, and expected to also make some extra cash from the newspapers which accepted their op-eds.

RELATED ENTRIES
Com. on Tax & Economic Growth
Economists' network
Robert Tollison & James Savarese
C4C Network Documents
C4C Network Members

Savarese and Tollison would put out a request to each network member, specifying the subject to be covered and including a few of the key themes to be promoted, together with any essential statistics. The professor-member was then expected to:

write an op-ed piece following the theme and guidelines provided (usually 1000-1500 words), but in layman's language.
send the article to the editor of a local city newspaper (specified by the minders). It was probably assumed that some would be paid a token freelance writer's fee by the newspaper. ($100-$250 at this time)
if the article was published (and many were since they were essentially free) then photocopies of the article were to be sent to two local Representatives or Congressmen (specified by the tobacco staff)
copies of the published piece would then be returned to Savarese for payment.

The professors would then be paid between$600 and $3000 for their efforts by way of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University; the amount varied over time.

The articles were commissioned via Savarese's staff, and the draft article was expected to be returned to the Institute for checking. They would make any necessary changes, and pass it through one or more of their major outside law firms for vetting. Sometimes Savarese or his staff might make changes also. Newspapers were designated in each region, so two or more articles didn't conflict.If the article was published (and sometimes even if they weren't) copies were to a designated Representative or Senator, with a note bringing the economist's 'independent opinion' to the Congressman's notice.

They were also paid to write letters-to-the-editor whenever the opportunity arose to promote the cigarette industry's line. For a period in 1987-88 the network was extended to also include Professors of Law and Business.

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-infrastructure-coverage-centers-corporate-front-groups-pushing

zach p

Sinclair Broadcast Group has in recent days aired misleading criticism of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals from organizations that are corporate front groups or push an anti-spending austerity agenda. But the facts and commentary from economists and other experts show that much of this criticism is disingenuous.

Sinclair sought commentary from pro-austerity organizations funded by corporations and right-wing donors

On March 30, Sinclair’s morning program The National Desk -- which airs on 68 Sinclair-owned or -operated local television stations -- interviewed Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl, who opposed spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure and was critical of including spending to combat climate change. Anchor Jan Jeffcoat chose not to disclose the Manhattan Institute’s funding from the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests.

Greenpeace has tallied more than $3 million in donations from Koch foundations to the Manhattan Institute between 1997 and 2017.
The Manhattan Institute received millions of dollars from oil interests, including at least $800,000 from ExxonMobil and $1.9 million from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which was one of the family foundations of the oil billionaire Koch brothers.
The Manhattan Institute employed a senior fellow named Robert Bryce who used his perch often to publicly question the reality of climate change.

Also on March 30, Sinclair chief political correspondent Scott Thuman included commentary in his report from Elaine Parker, chief communications officer of the Job Creators Network, which aired on dozens of Sinclair TV stationsbefore re-airing on The National Desk the next morning. Thuman failed to disclose that Job Creators Network is a conservative organization and a corporate front group for wealthy donors.

According to Sludge, a news outlet that reports on lobbying and money in politics, the Job Creators Network is “a front group for the interests of wealthy business executives. The nonprofit is linked to and funded by several wealthy corporate leaders who are also Republican political megadonors and oppose workers’ rights, including collective bargaining.”
Eyes on the Ties, which advocates for more transparency in how corporate power shapes policy, published in 2019 an article titled “The billionaire Trump donors behind the ‘Job Creators Network.’” It listed the right-wing Mercer family, Trump donor Bernie Marcus, and conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz as major donors to the organization. It also described the Job Creators Network as “part of a network of other astroturf groups that all fight tooth-and-nail to defend elite interests against progressive efforts to regulate corporate power.”

On April 1, Sinclair national correspondent James Rosen included commentary from Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in his report on Biden’s infrastructure plan, which also aired on dozens of Sinclair stations before re-airing on The National Desk. But Rosen failed to mention the pro-austerity nature of the organization and its namesake.

Peter G. Peterson, who founded the institute, had a long history of supporting austerity. In 2013, an editorial from The Nation explored Peterson’s Campaign to Fix the Debt, which it described as a “$60 million push to sell corporate America’s ruthless austerity agenda” and his “latest incarnation” of a “long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”
As the Center for Media and Democracy’s PRWatch reported in 2013, economists employed by the institute authored an error-riddled study that was used by governments around the world to justify harmful spending cuts and high unemployment.

These pro-corporate Sinclair guests’ commentary on Biden’s infrastructure bill was misleading or lacked full context

The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl claimed the price tag for Biden’s infrastructure plan is “just too big” to pay for and that Biden’s plan to rate the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% “would return us to the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD,” referring to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He also said: “The bill will simply not be paid for. Like a lot of what we’ve had with the stimulus, a lot of it's just going to go on the national credit card. So whether you think the infrastructure is helpful or not helpful, it’s probably going to be paid for mostly on the national debt if it’s enacted.” But Riedl’s comments are misleading at best and flat-out wrong at worst.

Biden’s planned increase of the corporate tax rate to 28% will keep the U.S. corporate tax rate below numerous other OECD countries, including Australia, France, and Portugal.
Federal revenue from corporations is near record lows according to data from the Tax Policy Center.
A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explained that “at least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations.”
The White House said that the proposed corporate tax increases would, over the course of 15 years, fully pay for the proposed spending.
Even if the spending were fully deficit-financed, economists say that the current fiscal environment makes that acceptable. Jason Furman, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said: “Given that interest rates are still too low … $2T in *unpaid for* well-designed investments, some temporary, would be beneficial. As such I don't think this should all or even mostly be paid for.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argued that in the fiscal environment the U.S. is facing, “sustained deficit spending on investment is actually good.”

Job Creators Network’s Elaine Parker hid the context of the business tax deduction she warned about removing when she said: “This is actually going to hit right at the heart of small businesses with that repeal of that 20% tax deduction. … That is the very tax deduction that helps the smallest of the small businesses, the heart of the middle class, and the employees who work for them.”

Parker didn’t specify what tax deduction she was talking about, but it appears to be one that didn’t exist until Trump’s tax cut, which mostly benefited corporations and the wealthy. CNBC’s reporting suggested many business owners were not even aware of the tax deduction until recently.
CNBC’s reporting also explained that tax deduction was temporary and is currently set to expire in 2025.

And the Peterson Institute’s Adam Posen left out necessary context when he warned: “This is the first truly credible inflation threat in decades.” But senior economists have pushed back against this kind of fearmongering over inflation.

As Business Insider reported, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a February speech that “inflation has been much lower and more stable over the past three decades than in earlier times.”
San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told Axios that Biden’s infrastructure plan is unlikely to lead to what Axios termed “out-of-control price increases.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also told Axios he supported Biden’s infrastructure proposal. Axios summed up Sitglitz’s view as that the plan “could break the U.S. out of the low-growth, low-inflation environment that has existed for the past 20 years.”

Economists and other experts agree Biden’s infrastructure spending plan is needed and beneficial

The fact is, massive investments in infrastructure are badly needed. An April 2 New York Times article explained: “Roadways and bridges are still in use decades after the end of their projected life spans. Sewer and water systems are aged and decaying. And a changing climate threatens to worsen old vulnerabilities and expose new ones.”

Reuters reported that the American Society of Civil Engineers said that “surface transportation, water systems, and schools are the most in need of help,” and that the U.S. “needs to spend $2.59 trillion in the next 10 years to fix existing infrastructure.” Biden’s infrastructure plan includes money for both existing and new infrastructure, such as energy and housing.

Economists from financial analysis firms have predicted that Biden’s infrastructure plan will create millions of jobs over a period of several years. Axios reported that S&P Global “predicts Biden's infrastructure plan will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024” and “raise per-capita income by $2,400.” And as USA Today reported, Moody’s Analytics expects Biden’s infrastructure plan to be more beneficial in the long term:

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, says the projects won't begin in earnest until 2023. He expects the economy to grow just 1.3% from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fourth quarter of 2022, with the Biden plan adding nothing to the gains.

…

Over a longer period, Biden’s plan would be a big positive, economists say. Zandi expects it to add about half a percentage point to growth in 2023 and 1.6 percentage points the following year. The blueprint, he reckons, would add about 1.4 million jobs in 2024 and 1 million jobs in 2025.

By 2030, the economy would be about $700 billion, or nearly 3%, larger than it would be without the upgrades and an additional 2.7 million Americans would be working, Moody's figures show.

https://www.**urban.org**/sites/default/files/**2019**/06/27/conservative_philanthropy_in_higher_education.pdf

...The importance of the Walgreen Foundation’s support raises a counterfactual: would these scholars have enjoyed prominent careers without that financial assistance? Like all counterfactuals, the conclusion must be speculative. Certainly, many of the scholars at theUniversity of Chicago who received funding from the Walgreen Foundation (such as Posner and Becker) may well have had brilliant academic careers even if the Walgreen Foundation and the Graduate School of Business had never existed. However, this misses the point: the success of George Stigler’s Walgreen-funded project created a scholarly network and a financial infrastructure with which to promote their pro–free market ideas. Without Walgreen’s support, that may well have been more difficult.

CASE STUDY II:HENRY MANNE AND LAW AND ECONOMICS

The success of Stigler’s project can be understood within the context of a broader conservative philanthropic movement that built upon past victories. Before Stigler constructed an antistatist economics and business program at the University of Chicago, Keynesians (who supported muscular state interventions in the economy) tended to dominate economic thought in the United States.

The most prominent economists and economics programs in America (e.g., Paul Samuelson, who served as an economic advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and built MIT’s economics department into a powerhouse) predominantly belonged to the Keynesian tradition.11 Stigler’s anti-statist economics program not only allowed for the transformation of economics programs throughout American higher education, but provided academic support for the conservative transformation of the law.

Steven Teles’s (2008) book on the development of the conservative legal establishment, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, strongly emphasizes the Chicago school’s importance in the creation of the field of “law and economics” in the 1970s. “Law and economics” is, essentially, the application of economic analysis—specifically economic analysis rooted in the Austrian school’s free market philosophy—to public policy and legal questions.12 Not every early attempt to institutionalize conservative legal and economics programs was as successful as Stigler’s. Henry Manne, whom Teles calls one the great organizational entrepreneurs of law and economics, attempted to build a dedicated conservative law program at the University of Rochester in the late 1960s by cultivating conservative alumni and foundation support.

...

CASE III: THE OLIN FOUNDATION AND THE BEACHHEAD THEORY

Although a dense network of conservative philanthropic foundations—including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation—became prominent funders of right-wing causes in the 1970s and early 1980s, the John M. Olin Foundation has received the most scholarly attention for the following three reasons: (1) it was one of the first conservative foundations to focus on giving in higher education to achieve its political aims, (2) its peer institutions considered it an innovative leader in right-wing philanthropic giving, and (3) it has actively supported studies that highlight its history and mission. Such studies include John J. Miller’s official history of the foundation, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, and Steven Teles’s more neutral The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, both of which received support from Olin Foundation grants. 17 Scholars and philanthropic officials have centered these points (particularly its reputation for innovation) in criticisms of the Olin Foundation’s politics (Sally Covington’s Moving a Public Policy Agenda, for example, devotes one of its major case studies to the foundation because of its reputation for innovation and impact).

Given the success of the Olin Foundation’s projects and of its broader vision of promarket social change rooted in college and university campuses, this reputation is well deserved.18 John M. Olin, whose Winchester Repeating Arms Company made a fortune during World War II manufacturing arms and ammunition for the US Army, was not the first right-wing billionaire to establish a dedicated philanthropic foundation in their name (Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and even the comparatively less wealthy Charles Walgreen preceded him). But Olin was concerned that “mission creep” had set in at the major establishment philanthropic organizations, leading them to betray their founders’ promarket ideals. He was determined to avoid the same fate, and to ensure his money was tied to meaningful institution-building and political change. The Olin Foundation was therefore designed to have a limited lifespan: Olin died in 1982, and the foundation folded in 2005 after having disbursed nearly $300 million to conservative causes.19

...

CASE IV: THE KOCHS AND GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

see tollison tobacco

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cash_for_Comments_Economists_Network

mod money theory

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/28/neoclassical-cruelty.html

gnd

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/heres-how-economists-are-blocking-progress-on-climate-change/

economics619

no links

Here’s how economists are blocking progress on climate change

written by Lynn Parramore June 24, 2019

Dutch economist Servaas Storm, co- author of a widely-read 2018 study on climate change, “Why Green Growth is an Illusion,” talks to the Institute for New Economic Thinking about where we are today.

Lynn Parramore: In 2018, you and your colleague Enno Schröder warned that economists promoting “green growth” are fostering illusions. Why can’t we have economic growth and development without destroying the planet?

Servaas Storm: In our work, Enno Schröder and I look at the historical record on economic growth around the world, along with human energy use and the resulting CO2 emissions. Then we construct a growth path for the global economy during the period 2015-2050. Our model path is based on optimistic, but still feasible, assumptions concerning future energy efficiency improvements and reductions in carbon emissions.

To understand what’s driving carbon emissions, it’s helpful keep a couple of things in mind. First, emissions will tend to grow at the same rate that the economy is growing. Economists call it the “scale” effect. But the more efficient we become at using energy and the better we get at reducing pollution through technology and changing human behavior, the more we can reduce carbon emission growth relative to real GDP growth.

So while the scale effect always raises CO2 emissions, what we call the ‘technological-change” effect lowers carbon emissions. That’s why economists talk about the goal of “decoupling” economic growth and CO2 emissions. You want a “technological-change” effect that’s bigger than the scale effect.

Disappointingly, we find no evidence so far of decoupling. Despite the 2017 Paris pledgesand good intentions, CO2 emissions are still rising, not just in China and India, but also in OECD countries (a coalition of wealthy countries that work together on common eco-social problems).

The energy efficiency improvements and rates of decarbonization aren’t yet enough to offset the carbon emission increases originating from the growth of the global economy. So the scale effect still dominates.

LP: What are economists missing when they talk as if decoupling is happening?

SS: There are deep uncertainties concerning the climate system and its interactions with the ecosystem of the Earth and the global economy, and self-reinforcing runaway warming is a real, though highly uncertain, possibility. Unfortunately, economists can’t handle any of this. It’s their first reflex to assume that it’s possible to use something called “optimal control.” That’s a technique of finding policy instruments that will control outcomes in a system, in this case working out the economically optimal pathways to solving or mitigating climate change in terms of the timing and the extent of CO2 emission reduction.

It all reminds me of a story told in Nathan Hill’s novel The Nix. In Norwegian folklore, the Nix is a ghost that takes on different shapes which it uses to mislead people, exploiting their vices and bad habits. The Nix appears as a beautiful horse which invites a young man to take a ride. Initially in awe and nervous, the young man steps on the horse’s back, and he rides – at first very slowly and cautiously, but then faster. The horse accelerates, and in his enthusiasm, the rider loses his awe and begins to feel all-powerful an in control. Surely he is the most talented horseman in the world. At exactly this point, the horse jumps off a cliff at full speed– and the young man gets killed on the rocky beach.

Economists suffer from similar self-deception when they believe their optimal control analyses of the costs and benefits of climate mitigation policies can inform climate policymaking in any meaningful manner. They can only become part of the solution once they realize that they are not engineers. The point is not to endlessly debate, for example, the optimal social cost of carbon, acting like the medieval scholars arguing about how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. Efficiency is not the issue. What matters is how effective the climate change policy is going to be.

The future has to be radically different from the past. Small tweaks and tinkering won’t cut it. We need structurally lower energy use and radically lower carbon emissions.

LP: What are some of the concerns with existing and well-known economic models?

SS: Climate economists, like economists in general, tend to forget that the policy conclusions drawn from their models are only as good, robust and realistic as the assumptions underlying the models they use – and this is precisely the problem: these assumptions are often flimsy, debatable and/or unrealistic. Let me mention three.

First, most well-known models fail to adequately capture small-probability but high-impact (catastrophic) outcomes associated with runaway global warming. Most models ignore that global warming may become an unstoppable self-reinforcing process once certain temperature thresholds are crossed.

Second, models estimate the societal net benefits of money spent on climate action and then compare these benefits to the returns which humanity could have made by investing the money not on some other, low-risk financial instrument, like government bonds. Such exercises imply that climate economists believe that government bonds will continue to yield rates of return of 3 – 3.5% each year even under deterioriating climate conditions. That’s a bit of a stretch.

Finally, most models assume that to finance the needed investments so as to have higher welfare in future, we must restrain our consumption today and raise savings. This logic is powerful. It appeals to the Calvinist notion of delayed gratification, which, according to Max Weber, was crucial to the Protestant Ethic and the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism. But it is wrong. Our economies are “monetary economies” in which commercial banks can create new money to finance investment and we don’t need to raise savings first. This means there is no trade-off between consumption now versus consumption in the future, as erroneously assumed in climate economics.

LP: What if we could acheive a radical break with the past? Could we then grow the global economy while reducing global CO2 emissions?

SS: Many scientists agree that the planet warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will be catastrophic. So it’s useful to think of trying to stay within a range of 1.5 degrees warmer or less.

Let’s say we have some amazing technological breakthroughs and we reduce emmissions by 85% by 2050, which some optimistic scientists think would allow us to avoid that limit. Alas, we find that even in that perhaps overly-optimistic scenario, the global per capita income growth still has to be very low. Pretty close to zero. Is that even possible?

“Green growth” is a very tough goal. I think it’s the wrong thing to emphasize. It may be better to focus on radically decarbonizing our economies. If we do this, and it turns out that our economies can still grow, then that’s great. But if getting the carbon emmissions down means that we can’t also have global economic growth, then we’ve got to accept that.

LP: But does that mean we can’t have economic progress? No hope for people’s economic lives to improve?

SS: Not at all. Economic growth and economic progress are not the same thing. If we were to say that rich OECD countries should aim to avoid increasing the amount of stuff they produce, they could still have goals of economic progress. They could aim instead for more and better jobs, greater access to education, health, public transportation, lower pollution burdens, and clean energy sources. Things that would be great for the majority of the population.

The issue is one of better distributing our economic resources, possibly as part of some Green New Deal.

LP: You’ve noted in the past that President Obama was not realistic in arguing that the U.S. economy could keep growing without increasing CO2 emissions thanks to the rollout of renewable energy technologies. How do you assess the situation now under Trump? What about Europe and China? Is anyone being more realistic today?

SS: The outlook is not good. The Trump administration is not the only government announcing its withdrawal from the voluntarist Paris agreement. (I call it voluntarist, because the agreement concerns official pledges by countries to reduce CO2 emissions, but lacks enforcement mechanisms). The Bolsanaro government in Brazil, the new government in Australia, part of the Italian government, and more are threatening to do the same.

China has made huge advances in energy efficiency and has also started to decarbonize, but the scale factor of China’s economic growth is still more than offsetting the drastic improvements in energy and carbon technologies.

The European Union (EU) is not delivering and policies are often counterproductive. Look at the ‘Yellow Vests’ protests in France. French President Macron proposed a consumer carbon tax on (car) fuels, which will hit the incomes of people who aren’t wealthy and who already have to cope with all kinds of economic insecurities and downward mobility. The outcome is not just a populist revolt, but a major discrediting of climate change mitigation policies.

In the Netherlands, the center-right government proposed a carbon tax on consumers but not on major polluting corporations.In March 2019, voters revolted. The government parties lost the provincial elections to a new rightwing populist party, which says that climate change is just a Marxist plot!

The EU has to come up with climate policies which protect the lower- and middle-income groups as much as is possible from the costs of adjustments, while taxing carbon emissions at their source. That means taxing the 100 global corporations which together are responsible for around 70% of cumulative CO2 emissions. It means taxing the rich to bring about a more fair and politically acceptable burden of adjustment.

LP: Is there any new political momentum on climate change that could help? What about the Green New Deal embraced by many Democrats in the U.S.?

SS: The recent electoral successes of the Green Parties in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and France do appear to suggest that there is a growing political momentum on climate change in the EU. But there is more than meets the eye.

The growing support for the Greens within the EU has come from voters abandoning the established center-left parties, like the social democrats. At the same time, there’s more support for populist center- or far-right parties, which deny or trivialize climate change and rally around a false dichotomy of “jobs” versus “the environment.” These politicians claim that they prioritize jobs, supposedly in contrast to the Greens.

Overall, the political landscape is becoming fragmented and polarized exactly at a time when we need collective, coordinated climate action.Attempts by President Macron and other governments to raise taxes on carbon-intensive consumption have seriously weakened popular support for climate mitigation. That gives the populist right a golden opportunity to beat the drum of climate change denialism. Scary stories about an impending end to life on Earth drive working-class people, many of whom have been facing existential economic insecurities for decades, into denial, and from there into the arms of the populist far-right.

The Greens have not yet convinced potential voters that there is no conflict between saving the environment and having good jobs, decent income, and high standards of living.

This is where the Green New Deal is crucial, if by it we mean a comprehensive program to green our economy and to replace private with public investment and consumption in order to adapt social and economic life to a changed environment. A Green New Deal of this kind should create good jobs and benefits rather than burden the lower- and middle-income classes. And it has to involve progressive, redistributive taxation to fund high-quality, zero-carbon, and accessible public transportation rather than expensive individual Tesla cars, accessible high-quality education and so on.

LP: You’ve observed that even good solutions won’t work within a socioeconomic system founded on ideas like letting markets “decide” who gets what and allowing big corporations to operate with little regulation. How do we have to shift our basic thinking in order to avoid climate catastrophe?

SS: As a society, we’ve given deregulated financial markets the task of maintaining the stability of the social and political order. Corporations are supposed to behave themselves in the proper way through pressure from shareholders and the stock market. Individuals are disciplined by engaging in labor markets and through debts. Governments, arguably, are being disciplined by bond markets. Market forces are supposed to keep everything and everyone working together the best way.

Economists call this “social efficiency.” They’ve swallowed the idea so completely that it’s hard for them to think about any alternative social order. Within this system, the only way you get behavioral change, like reducing CO2 emissios, is to use price incentives. You put a price on carbon, and eventually costs and prices will motivate self-interested firms and consumers to change their decisions and cut carbon emissions. The same price incentives are supposed to focus the minds of innovators and engineers on developing new zero-carbon (energy) technologies and products.

This is a fantasy. Slowing global warming requires deep transformational change, a process which in turn needs long-term steady directional thrust (in investment and technology development), which short-termist financial markets have never been able to provide in history and can’t provide by their very nature. Why? Because vested interests in the fossil-fuel economy will try to block or delay needed structural change. Plus, self-interested market behavior by individual producers and consumers does not automatically or necessarily add up to a better outcomes for society.

Progress on climate change demands collective action, both between nations and within nations. Questions of who is paying the cost and who is getting the benefits are critical.

We need coordination, direct steering and guidance of investment, research and develpment, along with innovation and mechanisms for burden sharing.

The effort can only work if it is inclusive, democratic and fair: the strongest shoulders must carry the largest burden. Bottom line: we have to think about alternative ways to ensure social and political order. I know that all this seems far-fetched and well beyond what is politically possible today. But I am old enough to agree with Jan Tinbergen, the first Nobel laureate in economics (jointly with Ragnar Frisch), that the “idealists of today often turn out to be the realists of tomorrow.”

LP: What do you say to people who dismiss you as an alarmist?

SS: That they are wrong. Ignoring the cumulative evidence on global warming is behaving like an ostrich. I try to be a realist, staying away from the often naive “can-do” engineering attitudes of techno-optimists (which ignore or underestimate major practical social and political obstacles standing in their way) and steering clear from the fatalist pessimism.

Slowing down climate change is technically and economically possible, but we need immediate and radical actions, most of which go against the vested interests of fossil-fuel corporations as well as against the established ideas and interests of most economists working on climate, who wrongly think that the problem can be solved in an economic-engineering fashion. Establishment economics should become part of the solution intead of the problem.

There is also ample scope to raise corporate taxes on Big Oil corporations and carbon-intensive (chemical) companies, many of which succesfully engage in massive tax evasion and shifting. We also have to fix the problem of political money by finding ways to inoculate our politics from corporate billionaire power. And if central banks are able to use unconventional monetary policy instruments to fight a global financial crisis and rescue banks, then they clearly should be able to do the same when fighting a looming climate disaster. There are grounds for optimism.

AN 119

hist policy

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/time-for-a-real-industrial-policy/

no lnx chart

The world is in desperate need for a revolution in economics education

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-world-is-in-desperate-need-for-a-revolution-in-economics-education/

written by The Conversation April 17, 2019

Economic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline’s teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings.

While academic research often manages to transcend this simplicity, undergraduate education does not – and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service.

Economists such as myself tend to speak in tightly coded jargon and mathematical models. We speak of “economic laws”, tacitly positioning these as analogous to the laws of physics. We wrap a thick layer of technical jargon around our study material and ban all moral or ethical discussions from the classroom. We attempt to take cover under the protective white lab coat of “real science”, a phenomenon described by Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek as scientism.

In short, economics has become a rather quaint and highly guarded discipline. We urgently need to update economics education to change this – because economics, as taught in universities, does not reflect or speak to many of the issues of the real world, be they political, environmental or social.

The political economy

Take the tricky entanglement between politics and economics, which economists tend to try to avoid. Such an attempt is futile. Sidelining politics, history and broader ideas while teaching economics, as most professors do, is like studying the “natural” flows of water in the Netherlands without taking into account that there are people living there who are steering it, building dikes, reclaiming land and channelling the water – and ignoring that they have been doing this for thousands of years already. You can’t study thesystem while ignoring the people who make it.

Politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx knew all too well. Somehow this has been forgotten. This does not mean economists need to get political or choose sides. But it does mean that we ignore politics at our own peril – by blindsiding ourselves or dismissing it as “external stuff”, we hamper our understanding of the very system we study.

Economists speak in numbers only, clinging to statistical data and quantitative models. We do so in the hope of looking objective. But this is counter-productive – “data” cannot tell us everything. Other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology use a broader range of methods, and consequently have a broader perspective on society. If we take our societal role of adviser on economic matters seriously, we will need to open up and adopt the insights that these other disciplines bring us about how the economy works.

It is true that academic economists are aware of the shortcomings of their discipline. But unfortunately, this awareness of the complexity of the economic system does not necessarily extend to those who leave university after their degree. And this is what the vast majority of economics graduates do. These are the people who go on to work in big business, governments and central banks, who shape policy and create our “economic common sense”.

Educational blinders

So what sort of ideas do these undergraduate economics students take out of university and into some of the most important careers in our societies?

Concerned student groups everywhere have started to systematically map this out. Student members of the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Association wrote a book surveying 174 economics modules at seven leading UK universities. They found that fewer than 10% covered anything other than mainstream economics. In the Netherlands, students found that real-world problems, from climate change to inequality, were seriously treated in only 6% of all modules and that only 2% of methods courses were not focused on statistical work.

A series of subsequent curriculum review projects, including one covering 13 countries from Argentina to Israel, found similar conditions in economics programs everywhere.

Undergraduate economists all over the world learn theories from textbooks that have barely changed since the 1950s. Those theories are based on individual agents, competing in markets to maximise narrowly defined “economic utility” (for people) or profit (for firms). The principles are taught with the same certainty as Newtonian physics, and are as devoid of value judgements.

This is absurd. Clearly, there are values; mainstream economics values efficiency, markets and growth – and puts individuals over collectives. Yet undergraduates are not taught to recognise, let alone question, these values – and the consequences are serious.

Shut down business schools? Two professors debate]

The models taught in our education ignore inequality, while our societies are being torn apart by it. In our classes, relentless economic growth is an unquestioned dogma, yet this same economic growth is rapidly ripping apart the ecological foundations of our world. And while we all may individually donate to charities, separate our trash and feel guilty about flying too much, we are collectively handicapped in reforming the very system that drives these problems.

Hope for change

There is hope for change, however. In the UK, a number of economics programmes are gradually becoming more pluralist in terms of theory and methods in response to the movement. Goldsmiths College in London, for instance, has renewed its PPE programme to include the same, and add other disciplines. And the Schumacher College in Devon now offers an Economics for Transition MSc which explicitly ties together economic and ecological systems. Meanwhile, an international accreditation system for pluralist Masters programmes is being set up.

But we need renewal on a much broader front: a new approach to economics education, one which does not hide behind the self-imposed limits of 19th century physics-style modelling, but instead considers the societal role of economists seriously. We need an economics which focuses on the entire economic system and which acknowledges all relevant sources of knowledge, rather than apprehensively clinging to statistical data. And one which addresses the issues that are most pressing for society, not those that comfortably fit within its mainstream method.

Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait for the present generation of economists to retire before this can happen. By that time, it might be too late.The Conversation

Joris Tieleman, PhD Candidate, Erasmus University Rotterdam

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Because science is transparent, it is also self-correcting. Researchers can interrogate, criticize and improve upon each others' work. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts made headlines when he found a number errors in an influential study authored by two Harvard economists. The paper showed that economic growth slows down in countries with high national debt, and it was used to justify austerity measures following the Great Recession. Herndon, 28, published a paper which called attention to the errors and refuted its conclusions about national debt.

This is how research works. Researchers evaluate and attempt to replicate the findings of their peers. They have every incentive to prove each other wrong. Herndon's work earned him the acclaim of serious economists, weeks of fawning press coverage and a star turn on The Colbert Report.Any person who could do the same for climate research would be similarly celebrated.

Koch uses Piereson's exact model today, financing neutral-sounded operations on dozens of campuses receiving six, seven and eight-figure donations from Koch and its donors partners. Recent examples include:

Arizona State University's $5 million Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, co-financed with the W.P. Carey Foundation.
University of Arizona's $2.5 million Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, co-financed by Ken and Randy Kendricks and Karl Eller.
University of Kentucky's $12 million Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise, co-financed with Papa Johns CEO John Schnatter.
University of Louisville's $6 million Center for Free Enterprise, co-financed with Papa Johns CEO John Schnatter in Kentucky.
University of Maryland at College Park's $6 million Center for Enterprise and Markets, co-financed with Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider.
Creighton University's $4.5 million Institute for Economic Inquiry, co-financed with Gail Werner-Robertson in Nebraska.
West Virginia University's $5 million Center for Free Enterprise, co-financed by Ken Kendricks

11 myths that wreck economy http://www.alternet.org/print/11-big-myths-about-economy-are-destroying-america

sexism a problem: cf summers et al beat up only woman who predicted the crash

Feminists like Susan Feiner have talked about neoclassical economics as a project that shores up a male-dominated society (and one that is also dominated by a particular class and race). The math/prediction fetish is very handy for this project because it allows economists to construct models in a way that tends to rationalize inequalities. Another way economists tend to justify inequalities is to rely on what are called “hierarchical dualisms.”

Throughout Western history, people have tended to present men as rational beings and women as irrational. It’s the old mind/matter division, in which man is associated with the mind and woman is linked to matter (which comes from the Latin word mater, meaning “mother”), or nature. You can see this gender bias playing out in all kinds of oppositional parings: the immortal soul (male) v. the body (female). Order (male) v. chaos (female). These dualisms are written into our language, our art, even our sciences.

http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/economics-and-gender

Reinhart And Rogoff's Pro-Austerity Research Now Even More Thoroughly Debunked By Studies

Posted: 05/30/2013 4:17 pm EDT | Updated: 05/31/2013 11:05 am EDT

The debunking of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff continues.

The Harvard economists have argued that mistakes and omissions in their influential research on debt and economic growth don't change their ultimate austerity-justifying conclusion: That too much debt hurts growth.

But even this claim has now been disproved by two new studies, which suggest the opposite might in fact be true: Slow growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around.

In a post at Quartz, University of Michigan economics professor Miles Kimball and University of Michigan undergraduate student Yichuan Wang write that they have crunched Reinhart and Rogoff's data and found "not even a shred of evidence" that high debt levels lead to slower economic growth.

And a new paper by University of Massachusetts professor Arindrajit Dube finds evidence that Reinhart and Rogoff had the relationship between growth and debt backwards: Slow growth appears to cause higher debt, if anything.

As you can see from the chart from Dube's paper below, growth tends to be slower in the five years before countries have high debt levels. In the five years after they have high debt levels, there is no noticeable difference in growth at all, certainly not at the 90 percent debt-to-GDP level that Reinhart and Rogoff's 2010 paper made infamous. Kimball and Wang present similar findings in their Quartz piece. (Story continues below chart.)...http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/reinhart-rogoff-debunked_n_3361299.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Pete Peterson Linked Economists Caught in Austerity Error

by Mary Bottari [1] — April 18, 2013 - 11:59am

Topics: Economy [2]

Projects: Real Economy Project [3]

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Reinhart-Rogoff Study Debunked

Three years ago, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a study [5] that presented empirical evidence from 44 nations over a 200 year time span to demonstrate that countries with a public debt over 90 percent of GDP (the United States is at about 100 percent, Japan at 200 percent) have average growth rates one percent lower than other nations.

Forty-four countries, 200 years, Harvard -- pretty convincing, huh?

Except it was wrong.

When the PERI team finally got a hold of the data used by Reinhart and Rogoff, they uncovered gaping problems [6]. They found that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth." Adjusting for these errors, the Amherst team contends that "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent."

It would all be a Massachusetts "Ivory Tower" kerfluffle if the Reinhart-Rogoff study were not cited by practically everyone in Washington, including Paul Ryan, Simpson-Bowles, and the entire "Fix the Debt" crowd, to justify harmful cuts and a stalemate on stimulus currently condemning millions to mass unemployment.

And it should come as no surprise that the economists have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson.

Study Used to Justify Harmful Cuts and High Unemployment

It is hard to understate the importance of the study. It has been cited [7] around the globe by academics, politicians, and the mainstream media. In the U.S., it is one of Paul Ryan's favorite justifications for his draconian Path to Prosperity [8] budget, for GOP rejection of further stimulus, and the Fix the Debt crowd's frenzied calls for urgent action. President Obama is now on the austerity bandwagon, enacting numerous cuts and proposing new cuts to programs like Social Security in order to achieve a "Grand Bargain" on deficits. As a consequence, mass unemployment is a new normal.

In Europe, "R&R's work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences" for real people, says economist Dean Baker in a piece called "How Much Unemployment Did Reinhart and Rogoff's Arithmetic Mistake Cause?" [9]

Time and time again, economists tried to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results, but to no avail. Now, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin show us why [6]. One mistake, admitted by the authors and gaining the most attention, is an Excel spreadsheet error. Check out the screen shot [10] of the year.

As the authors put it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49... This spreadsheet error... is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category." Belgium, in particular, has 26 years with debt-to-GDP above 90 percent, with an average growth rate of 2.6 percent (though this is only counted as one total point due to the weighting above).

Mother Jones dubbed it "the Excel Error Heard Round the World."

Pete Peterson's Fingerprints

It will come as no surprise that Reinhart and Rogoff have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, [11] a big fan of their work. Peterson has been advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare for decades in order to prevent a debt crisis he warns will spike interest rates and collapse the economy. (Peterson failed to warn of the actual crisis building on Wall Street during his time at the Blackstone Group.)

When Washington Post writer Suzy Khimm pointed out to Peterson [12] that the U.S. built significant deficits during the financial crisis but maintained very low interest rates, Peterson responded that America still needed to be on high alert: "you know [Kenneth] Rogoff and [Carmen] Reinhart -- I've talked to them, and they say [debt crises] are sudden, they're sharp, they're very substantial. The risk is simply too big. At some point, if we lurch from crisis to crisis, then confidence will decline on our economy in general."

As the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in the online report, "The Peterson Pyramid," [13] the Blackstone billionaire turned philanthropist has spent half a billion dollars to promote this chorus of calamity. Through the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peterson has funded practically every think tank and non-profit that works on deficit- and debt-related issues, including his latest astroturf supergroup, "Fix the Debt," which has set a July 4, 2013 deadline for securing an austerity budget [14].

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as "the most influential female economist in the world," was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics [15] founded, chaired, and funded [16] by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit [17] along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on [18]. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation [19].

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board [20] of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published [21] a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, "A Decade of Debt," where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a "debt burden" stretching into 2017 that "will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come." (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

Bankrupt Analysis

The authors have issued two rebuttals to the Amherst study. In their latest [22], they object that anyone would think they were "misconstruing analysis to support austerity" or a political agenda. Perhaps it had to do with pieces like this one entitled "Too Much Debt and the Economy Can't Grow" [23] that warns against further stimulus at a time when mass unemployment is wreaking devastation on the lives and livelihoods of workers young and old.

Economists like Herndon, Ash, Pollin, Baker, and Krugman have never bought the argument that economies can cut their way out of a crisis, and now data from the Reinhart-Rogoff study, from numerous European countries, from the IMF [24], and even from CMD's home state of Wisconsin (now ranked an astonishing 44th in job creation) [25], support their contentions.

If only they had half a billion to spread the word.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

==david roberts in grist 22feb 11 argues that rw economists argue our descendents will be richer, so it makes sense for them to pay for mitigation eg Manzi, Wm Nordhaus (yale) and Lomborg

As one example, corporations that don’t like climate change warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. Or, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research. This is especially dangerous when pharmaceutical companies take control of university labs to test efficacy or safety and then push approval through the governmental agencies. Another example is in economics departments — and movies like The Inside Job have done a great job of showing how Wall Street has bought off high-profile economists from Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or MIT, to talk about the state of the stock market and the country’s financial stability. Papers were being presented and published that were blatantly false, by well-respected economists who were on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch.

alternet

***

hired by ERCC to diss EPA particulate/mercury limits 12/22/11

NERA Economic Consulting is a firm consisting principally of microeconomists. It was founded as the National Economic Research Associates and forms part of the Oliver Wyman Group which in turn belongs to Marsh & McLennan Companies. Company research website Vault.com ranked NERA as the No. 1 economic consulting firm in its 2009 guide to the Top 50 Consulting Firms, ahead of competitors such as Cornerstone Research, CRA International, Analysis Group, LECG, Europe Economics, Oxera, Compass Lexecon, and McKinsey’s economic consulting practice.

NERA specializes in solving economic issues in areas such as securities, finance, telecommunications, energy, transport, and other self regulated industries, and providing expert witness testimony for antitrust copyright and intellectual property cases.

NERA was founded in 1961, and its founding president was Irwin Stelzer, a City College of New York Economics professor.

Offices

US: White Plains (headquarters), Boston, Chicago, Denver, Ithaca, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC

Canada: Toronto

Europe: Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Geneva

Asia Pacific: Auckland, Beijing, Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Tokyo, Wellington[1]

References

^ “NERA Economic Consulting”. NERA. http://www.nera.com/Offices.asp. Retrieved on 2008-04-25.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERA_Economic_Consulting

Robert D. Tollison and James M. Savarese were the leading member (probably the founders) of the Tobacco Institute's clandestine Economists' Network -- a group of academics who helped the tobacco industry fight proposed tax increase on cigarettes, and the declining acceptability of public and workplace smoking by:

generating favorable research for publication,
presenting favorable papers at academic conferences and symposia, and
being ready to challenge the 'social costs' economic arguments employed by anti-smoking activist at public and legislative forums.
writing letters-to-the-editor and lecturing to journalists, on behalf of the industry.

They were employed by the tobacco industry to counter the claims by anti-smoking activists and public-health advocates that the cost that both active- and passive-smoking imposed on the community was excessive, and therefore required regulation on purely economic grounds ... let alone the medical and nuisance factors. This became known in the tobacco industry as the 'Social Costs' argument, and the industry had numerous internal working groups trying to find solution to this political/economic problem, and they employed large numbers of economists and others to counter the attack.

Contents[hide]

Social Cost

The term "social costs" refers to a number of related claims:

- that smokers cost employers more than nonsmoking employees due to increased absenteeism, higher health care costs, and for the additional cleaning expenses.
- that smokers impose a community cost because of the increased fire danger they cause.
- smokers created public litter and odours, and made sections of the public space unavailable to non-smokers.
- that smokers cost the state and federal governments more because of hospital, medical and welfare subsidies.
- the early death of smokers left spouses and children dependent on welfare.

The economists countered these claims by:

- challenging the statistical studies and the validity of the data being used.
- pointing to the high rates of federal and state duties and tax imposed on cigarettes
- pointing out that, since smokers die at a younger age, they actually costs less than non-smokers (using very dubious figures) because they were not dependent on welfare in their old age.

^[1]^

Identified Members of the network

Robert D. Tollison appears to have been the principle organisers of the network. He worked out of George Mason University, and ran a subsidiary foundation for this kind of commercial lobbying known as the Center for Study of Public Choice. Tollison is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth,
James M. Savarese President of James Savarese and Associates an economic consulting firm which has been headquartered in Washington DC. It was founded in 1981 and claims to have associates at major universities in more than 40 states' who can be called upon for extra-curricular work.
Harold M. Hochman, from the City University of New York. He also figured in the Tobacco Institute's Public Relations Divisions' Resources Catalog. [1] Hochman is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth,
Thomas E. Borcherding, Professor of Economics, Claremont Graduate School in California. He was also on the 1995 Advisory Board of far-right-wing Independent Institute. [2] and the Public Relations Resources Commitee of the Tobacco Institute lists him as a potential witness. Borcherding is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth,
Fred McChesney, Emory University Law School, Georgia. McChesney is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth,
Dolores T. Martin, of the Uni of Nebraska. Martin is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth,
Richard Vedder, Ohio University Department of Economics, Athens, Ohio ^[2]^

Network activities

James Savarese worked extensively for the tobacco industry for many years on the recruitment of economists to support the industry, and for part of this time he worked with his old associate, Bob Tollison. [3]

In 1995 they jointly made a proposal to the tobacco industry for a 'Social Cost Program' [4], which was fundamentally the preparation of an economics paper intended to exploit George Mason University's credentials as a trust-worthy academic institute. The initial paper was to take one month to write and cost $27,500, and they were also intending to involve other members of their Economists' Network in milking the tobacco cash-cow and extending the propaganda value. Their proposal read:

*"This paper will be readable. but technically designed for publication in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] or other major economic journals. An initial version will be prepared as a George Mason University Department of Economics working paper for circulation to interested parties.

The white paper will include an Executive Summary, which can be used as a briefing fact shee{ for distribution among appropriate decision makers. This paper can be adapted as a sophisticated op-ed with attempted placements in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or the Washington Times."*

In addition to this initial paper they wanted another $35,000 for one attacking a Rand Report which had not favoured the tobacco industry:

In the preparation of this paper. no original research is contemplated and assumptions will be carefully written to demonstrate that assumptions made by Rand and others are not necessarily accepted by authors but are used for the purpose of argument. This paper can be adapted as a sophisticated op-ed with attempted placements in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or the Washington Times.

They then proposed to swing their Economists network into action by paying the members to write letters to the editor (LTE's) in support of the tobacco-funded position. This was being done primarily to influencing politicians, and it was estimated that the letters would need to be commissioned at $3,000 per market. Tollison and Savarese would organize this operation through their network:

A more comprehensive op-ed program which will involve a network of 20 economists attempting to place op-eds in major newspapers in targeted Congressional districts. Development of these op-eds will be supervised by Dr. Tollision and will be based on the findings of the white papers. Placements will be matched with key Republicans in Congress, both out of the ranks of the leadership and the new Republican members. In some cases. key Democrats have been targeted.

Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth

The Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth, was "an informal committee of economists from 42 states who have collectively and individually participated in activities on behalf of the tobacco industry in the areas of excise taxation and public smoking" according to an Tobacco Institute memo. ^[3]^ This committee was supported by the Tobacco Institute (TI) through advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather's public relations division (O&M) and James Savarese and Associates.

It is not entirely clear how much overlap there is between the Economist's network which appears to be jointly run by Tollison and Savarese, and the Committee, which involves Ogilvy & Mather. They may just have been different phases of the same development.

Membership list of the Economists' network

Clearly this is only a partial list of the associates of Robert Tollison and James Savarese. These economists were not just available to the tobacco industry, but to corporations in general if they ever needed an economist to counter an economic argument. Curriculum vitae of each of these economists was available on request. Some may also be available to prepare op-ed pieces for the local newspapers on request: [5]

"Those economists who have testified or prepared op-ed pieces on the economic effects of public smoking are marked accordingly. The others may be briefed on the potential cost to government of implementing smoking restrictions. "

Abrams, Burton, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
Alston, Lee, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA
Amacher, Ryan, (Dean) College of Commerce and Industry, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Anderson, William, (Prof.) Ph.D, Office of Economic, and Community Development, City of Chatanooga, Chatanooga, TN
Anderson, Terry, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT
Armentano, Dominick, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT
Bohanon, Cecil, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Ball State University, Muncie, IN
Borcherding, Thomas, (Prof.) Economics Department, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA Borcherding was a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth set up specifically by the tobacco industry.
Butler, Henry, (Prof.) Department of Management, School of Business, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Coats, Morris, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Marshall University, Huntington, WV
Crew, Michael, (Prof.) School of Administrative Sciences, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ
Dalton, Allan, (Prof.) Economics Department, Boise State university, Boise, ID
Denzau, Arthur, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO ,
Dobitz, Cliff, (Prof.) Department of Economics, North Dakota State, Fargo, ND
Eberts, Randall, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Ekelund, Robert B., Jr., (Prof) Lowder Professor of Economics, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Faith, Roger L., (Prof.) , Department of Economics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Gaspari, Celeste, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Vermont, Burlington,VT
Gay, David, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AK
Greene, Kenneth V., (Prof.) Department of Economics, State University of New York, Binghampton, NY
Hanna, Sherman, (Prof.) Economics Department, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS
Harper-Fender, Anne, (Prof.) Head, Department of Economics, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
Hein, Dennis, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Augustana College , Sioux Falls, SD
Heins, James, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
Hochman, Harold M., (Prof.) Public Policy Program-School of Business, City University of New York, New York, NY. Hochman is a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth set up specifically by the tobacco industry.
Hoffer, George Emil, (Prof.) Chairman, Department of Economics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Hunter, William, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI
Jadlow, Joseph, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK
Kormendi, Roger, (Prof) Professor of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Kurth, Michael, (Prof.) Department of Economics, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA
Laband, David, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Catonsville, MD
Lee, Dwight, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA

:Lee testified against proposed public smoking legislation in Harrisburg-and Philadelphia, PA, in mid-1985. He was a long-term tobacco lobbyist who worked for the industry on numerous projects.

Lindsay, Cotton Mather, (Prof.) J. Wilson Professor of Managerial Economics, Department of Economics, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Logue, Dennis, (Prof.) Tuck School Of Business, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Martin, Delores, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NB
McChesney, Fred, (Prof.) Emory University, School of Law, Atlanta, GA McChesney was a founding member of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth set up specifically by the tobacco industry.
McMahon, Robert C., (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME

:McMahon delivered testimony on the negative impacts of public smoking restrictions in early 1985 in Maine.

Mead, Arthur, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI
Menchik, Paul, (Prof.) Economics Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
Militello, John F., Economic researcher, Wharton Center for Applied Research, Philadelphia, PA
Parkman, Allen, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NX
Peterson, William, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Tennessee-Chatanooga, Chatanooga, TN
Pogue, Thomas, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Poulson, Barry, (Prof.) Head, Department of Economics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

:Poulson wrote an op-ed on negative effects of proposed public smoking legislation in Colorado Springs. Article appeared on Aug. 4, 1985 in Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

Raab, Raymond, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Minnesota-Duluth, Duluth, MN
Rucker, Randy, (Prof.) Department of Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Sandler, Todd, (Prof.) Department of Economics, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY
Shugart, William, (Prof.) Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

: Shugart has contributed to the preparation of several , pieces of testimony on public smoking restrictions.

Sweetser, Wendell E., (Prof.) Department of Economics, Marshall University, Huntington, WV
Tollison, Robert, Director, Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

: Tollison testified against the workplace smoking bill, proposed by the DC City Council in July 1905, and the Federal workplace smoking bill (S.1440), in October 1985. He also has prepared other testimony on the issue. Tollison was the founder of the Committee on Taxation and Economic Growth set up specifically by the tobacco industry.

Vedder, Richard, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Ohio University, Athens, OH
Wagner, Richard, (Prof.) Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

: Wagner testified against public smoking legislation in Tallahassee, Florida, early in 1985. He was a close associate of Tollison and co-writer of much of the material.

Watson, Keith, (Prof.) , Economics Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL

References

↑ "Social Costs" Activities. Chilcote SD Jr. Letter. March 16, 1988. R.J. Reynolds Bates No. 506644070/4073
↑ James Savarese Memorandum to Fred Panzer, Jeff Ross and Susan Stuntz, Tobacco Institute documents collection, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, January 6, 1987, Bates No. TI18230621 at page -0626
↑ "Current Relations: Academics", undated.

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity

April 18, 2013 |

The world of economics has just changed, and somebody has some 'splaining to do! Please savor the following twisted tale of bad math, academic folly and pundit hubris.

Since 2010, the names of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous in political and economic circles. These two Harvard economists wrote a paper, “Growth in the Time of Debt” that has been used by everyone from Paul Ryan to Olli Rehn of the European Commission to justify harmful austerity policies. The authors purported to show that once a country's gross debt to GDP ratio crosses the threshold of 90 percent, economic growth slows dramatically. Debt, in other words, seemed very scary and bad.

Their historical data appeared impressive, as did their credentials. Policy-makers and journalists cited the paper to convince the public that instead of focusing on the jobs crisis that was hampering recovery, we should instead focus on deficits. The deficit hawks jumped up and down with excitement.

But something didn’t smell right.

Progressive economists I knew were shocked at what appeared to be the shoddiness of the research and the absurdity of the conclusions. In their paper “A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession [3],” Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson observed that R&R had truncated their sample of British data in a way that skewed their conclusions, eliminating more than a century of data in which British debt loads exploded but economic growth raced ahead (see pages 11-13). The always savvy Marshall Auerback called them out in a blog [4] for New Deal 2.0, which I edited at the time, criticizing the relevance of the cases they had used to justify their conclusions.

But plenty of pundits took their suspect arguments as gospel. The editorial board of the Washington Post declared that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth." The economists cited were Reinhart and Rogoff, whom the WP passed off as speaking for the entire field. A new Washington consensus was born, and the public was hammered with the idea that cutting jobs, stripping away vital public services and letting infrastructure crumble was a good way to get the economy going. Most any ordinary person on the street would probably intuit that this made no sense, but there was this Academic Research By Esteemed Persons, so the argument was over.

Enter Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the heroes of this story. Herndon, a 28-year-old graduate student, tried to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results as part of a class excercise and couldn’t do it. He asked R&R to send their data spreadsheet, which had never been made public. This allowed him to see how the data was put together, and Herndon could not believe what he found. Looking at the data with his professors, Ash and Pollin, he found a whole host of problems, including selective exclusion of years of high debt and average growth, a problematic method of weighing countries, and this jaw-dropper: a coding error in the Excel spreadsheet that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin write: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49...This spreadsheet error...is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category."

A coding error! Reinhart and Rogoff had been so sloppy in their work that they had not bothered to check their own spreadsheet.

When you fix R&R's problematic methodology and coding errors, you get a very different result that – guess what? – does not support austerity and shows that countries can most certainly cross the phony debt-to-GDP “threshold” and grow.

In their newly released paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff [5]” Herndon, Ash and Pollin show that "when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower."

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin have set off a firestorm, with those who long suspected that R&R's work was crap shouting hallelujah and defenders scrambling to figure out a way to support deficit hysteria [6] despite the body blow to their theory.

Bottom line: The foundation of the entire global push for austerity and debt reduction in the last several years has been based on a screwup in an Excel spreadsheet and poorly constructed data.

Reinhart and Rogoff are on the defensive. As Mathew O'Brien at The Atlantic put it, "this is the academic's version of the dream where you're naked in public." They have screwed up royally. They have also done a great deal of damage to the world. As Paul Krugman has observed, their replies to their critics have thus far only compounded the confusion. They need to come clean, stop talking like their mistakes are minor, and own up to the enormity of their errors. And a big round of applause goes to the folks at U Mass Amherst for getting to the bottom of this insanity.

extracted from some petition?

Social Scientists:

"The assessment of regional environmental and social impacts is a multidisciplinary task that involves natural and social scientists working in tandem with policy makers." - American Meteorological Society

Alan Carlin, B.S. Physics, Ph.D. Economics, Senior Economist, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, USA

Alan Moran, Ph.D. Economics, Director of the IPA's Deregulation Unit, Australia

Alex MacMillan, Ph.D. Professor of Economics and Finance (Retired), Queen's University, USA

Alex Robson, Ph.D. Economics, Irvine, USA

Alister McFarquhar, Ph.D. Economics, UK

Andrei Illarionov, Ph.D. Economics, Russia

Andrew N. Kleit, Ph.D. Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Andrew P. Morriss, Ph.D. Economics, MIT, USA

Aynsley Kellow, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Tasmania, Australia

Art Carden, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Rhodes College, USA

Ben Stein, B.S. Economics, USA

Benny Peiser, Ph.D. Professor of Social Anthropology, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

Bjørn Lomborg, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics, Former Director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark

Brent L. Sohngen, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics, The Ohio State University, USA

Bruce D. McCullough, Ph.D. Professor of Decision Sciences, Drexel University, USA

Bruce Yandle, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics, Clemson University, USA

Carl P. Close, M.A. Economics, USA

Cass R. Sunstein, Professor of Environmental Law, Harvard Law School, USA

Craig S. Marxsen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska Kearney, USA

Daniel J. Mitchell, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Daniel K. Benjamin, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Daniel R. Simmons, B.A. Economics, USA

Daniella Markheim, M.A. Economics, USA

David A. Ridenour, B.A. Political Science, USA

David Almasi, B.A. Political Science, USA

David R. Henderson, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Naval Postgraduate School, USA

David Kreutzer, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Dennis T. Avery, M.S. Agricultural Economics, USA

Don Aitkin, Ph.D. Political Science, Australia

Donald I. Hertzmark, M.S. Ph.D. Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics, USA

Donald J. Boudreaux, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Donald Trump, B.S. Economics, USA

Douglas Southgate, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics, The Ohio State University, USA

Edwin J. Feulner, M.B.A. Ph.D. Economics, USA

Eugene M. Trisko, B.A. Economics, J.D. Law, Member, EPA Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, USA

Frank Milne, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Queen's University, Canada

G. Cornelis van Kooten, Ph.D. Professor of Agricultural & Resource Economics, Univeristy of Victoria, Canada

Gabriel Calzada, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain

Gary M. Galles, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Pepperdine University, USA

George F. Will, Ph.D. Political Science, USA

George Reisman, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics, Pepperdine University, USA

Hans H.j. Labohm, Economist, Expert Reviewer, IPCC (2007), The Netherlands

Ingemar Nordin, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Linköping University, Sweden

J. Huston McCulloch, Ph.D. Professor of Economics and Finance, The Ohio State University, USA

James Johnson, M.A. Ph.D. Economics, USA

James Inhofe, B.A. Economics, USA

Jean-Luc Migue, PhD Economics, Canada

Jeff Kueter, B.A. Political Science and Economics, M.A. Political Science, M.A. Security Policy Studies and Science & Technology Studies

Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. Political Science, USA

Jerry Taylor, B.A. Political Science, USA

John Brätland, Ph.D. Senior Economist, U.S. Department of the Interior

John D. Graham, Ph.D. Dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University

John J. Ray, Ph.D. Psychology, Mensa Member, Australia

John R. Lott, Ph.D. Economics, USA

John Stossel, B.A. Psychology, USA

Julian Morris, M.A. Economics, M.Sc. Environment and Resource Economics, M.Phil. Land Economics, UK

Junsoo Lee, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Alabama, USA

Kendra Okonski, B.A. Economics, USA

Kenneth W. Chilton, Ph.D. Director of the Institute for Study of Economics and the Environment, Lindenwood University, USA

Karen Campbell, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Kesten C. Green, Ph.D. Management Science, New Zealand

Margo Thorning, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Marlo Lewis, B.A. Political Science, Ph.D., USA

Mark C. Strazicich, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Appalachian State University, USA

Michael Beenstock, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Michael S. Rozeff, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Finance And Managerial Economics, University of Buffalo, USA

Molly Espey, Ph.D. Professor of Applied Economics & Statistics, Clemson University, USA

Myron Ebell, M.Sc. Economics, USA

Nicolas Loris, M.A. Economics, USA

Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PPE Oxford, UK

Paul E. Godek, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Peter V. Bias, Ph.D. Professor of Business and Economics, Florida Southern College, USA

Randall G. Holcombe, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Florida State University, USA

Randy T. Simmons, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Utah State University, USA

Richard W. Rahn, Ph.D. Business Economics, USA

Rob Blackstock, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, The College of Business, USA

Robert L. Bradley Jr., M.A. Economics, Ph.D. Political Economy, USA

Robert Higgs, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics, USA

Robert J. Michaels, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, California State University, USA

Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Roland Granqvist, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Dalarna University, Sweden

Ronad Rychlak, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Mississippi School of Law, USA

Ross McKitrick, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph, Expert Reviewer, IPCC, Canada

Roy E. Cordato, M.A. Ph.D. Economics, USA

Stephan Wilksch, Dr-Ing Professor of Economic Science, University of Technolgy and Economics Berlin, Germany

Terry L. Anderson, Ph.D. Economics, USA

Thomas A. Birkland, Ph.D. Political Science, USA

Thomas Gale Moore, M.A., Ph.D. Economics, USA

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Loyola University Maryland, USA

Thomas Sowell, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics, UCLA, USA

Timothy D. Terrell, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Wofford College, USA

Vaclav Klaus, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, President of the Czech Republic

Walter Block, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Loyola University New Orleans, USA

Walter E. Williams, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, George Mason University, USA

Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D. Economics, USA

William Evans, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Notre Dame, USA

William Junga, Ph.D. Economics, USA

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Frostburg State University, USA

William D. Nordhaus, Ph.D. Economics, MIT, USA

William W. Beach, M.A. Economics, USA

Willis Eschenbach, B.A. Psychology, USA

Wolfgang Kasper, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of New South Wales, Australia

Yaron Brook, B.Sc. Civil Engineering, Ph.D. Finance, USA