Protests that began on Wall Street and spread to cities across America have now reached the pristine halls of Harvard. That’s right, the country’s oldest university is experiencing walkouts by students sympathizing with the “Occupy” movement. The source of their frustration: Students don’t like the content presented in an introductory course in economics. The professor, Greg Mankiw, is one of the world’s best-known economists and served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush. Never mind those credentials, however. According to some students, Mankiw is indoctrinating America’s …
Alan Krueger, President Obama’s nominee as chair of the White House Council on Economic Advisors, received accolades from liberals yesterday for his stances on a number of major economic issues, including his support for a cap and trade regime, and value added tax, and the Cash for Clunkers program. But few of his contributions to economics are more widely hailed by the left than a single study he published with David Card in 1993 which purported to show that a higher minimum wage does not necessarily lead to greater unemployment, …
President Obama’s pick as chairman of the White House Council on Economic Advisors co-authored a paper that showed that extending unemployment benefits will likely exacerbate joblessness. The paper’s findings run counter to the president’s economic argument for an unemployment benefit extension, which is expected to be a major part of the jobs plan he will unveil early next month. Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, who will replace Austan Goolsbee as the White House’s chief economic advisor, “is likely to provide a voice inside the administration for more-aggressive government action to …
Last week, the White House announced a new White House White Board video series in which “one of our key players on the White House team will cut through the political back-and-forth you hear every day and break down an issue affecting American families into simple, understandable terms”. Their first video features Austan Goolsbee, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, discussing the looming expiration of the 2001/2003 tax cuts. As you might expect, the video contains a number of distortions and falsehoods that we simply couldn’t ignore. …
President Obama reportedly plans to name Austan Goolsbee to head his Council of Economic Advisers. This appointment is good news for advocates of expanded international trade. One of the world’s leading trade economists, Jagdish Bhagwati, described Goolsbee as a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade. During the presidential campaign, Goolsbee described his views on trade in the following way: I do believe there’s no one more in favor of open markets than me and that said, if you look at a free trade agreement—if you have never …
The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) has released a projection of jobs created by the economic stimulus bill. However, the method they used to get these numbers falls short of basic scientific standards. The CEA modeled a potential outcome for the economy without the stimulus, basing it on historical data. They then compared this computer simulation with the actual data about what occurred with the stimulus – and have declared that the stimulus worked. This method would be met with a failing grade in any decent university economics …
At Econbrowser, Dr. Menzie Chinn provides a succinct summary of my critique of CEA’s “Economic Impact of the Stimulus” report when he writes, “…these implied increments to growth rates do not jibe with the inferences drawn by Dr. Campbell — that the impact on GDP is much smaller than CEA asserts when using forecasts from the other agencies and firms.” (italics mine). My critique was that the CEA’s method for estimating the economic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) cannot be used to make a meaningful inference …
The chances our good that The Heritage Foundation will not love everything that President-elect Barack Obama does. So let us all celebrate Obama’s strong choice of University of California at Berkeley Professor of Economics Christina Romer as Chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers. We specifically hope that Mrs. Romer packs three specific papers she wrote when she departs for Washington: from the abstract for The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks: “This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level …
