Leading Economists Now Lean Left

One of the great woes of economic policy is that it will always be inextricably bound up with politics. In engineering, you can design a crankshaft, and all you have to worry about is how well the crankshaft performs and how much it costs. If engineering were like economics, you would have to worry about how the crankshaft was going to redistribute income and about who would win and who would lose from the crankshaft. Naturally, that means that every political tribe is going to have its own preferred economic policy package, since every tribe represents a coalition of various interest groups, and each of those groups will demand economic policies that suit their interests.

Most economists would probably rather be technocrats -- just engineers, sitting in their offices and making their models. There was even a time when top economists hoped that this would become the case; John Maynard Keynes imagined a future where economists would be as boring as dentists. But that future never came to pass. Economic policy remains a politicized subject, and it probably always will be, and we’re all probably just going to have to reconcile ourselves to that fact.