Conservatives Don't Have a Secret Formula for Growth

John Cochrane, a highly respected finance professor at University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, has posted a long manifesto about how to boost U.S. economic growth. He offers a very standard list of conservative and libertarian ideas -- lower taxes, slash regulation, privatize education and increase immigration. Some of these are good ideas, others are neutral and others would be counterproductive. But a full evaluation of the entire standard conservative policy platform is too big a job for one column.

Instead, I want to focus on one bad argument that Cochrane uses. Most of the so-called growth policies Cochrane and other conservatives propose don't really target growth at all, just short-term efficiency. By pretending that one-shot efficiency boosts will increase long-term sustainable growth, Cochrane effectively executes a bait-and-switch.