Posted by
Andrews on Sunday, July 12, 2009 11:24:03 AM
I admit I have been a critic of George Will many times ("
George Will Gets It Wrong","
Greed", "
A Really Foolish Idea","
Debt","
Materialist Arrogance", "
Keeping the Drug Cartels Alive", "
Surprised"), but in each of those cases he has deserved it. However, I have generally agreed with the consensus that, while he may be wrong in specific instances, he is generally a thoughtful fellow. But now I have to think maybe I was wrong, maybe he is not half as bright as we have been led to think by conventional wisdom. Maybe he never was. Or maybe he was, but he has now imbibed too much of Washington's political ambiance and accepted too much of the capital's political wisdom.
Whatever the case, he has not just begun to make many errors, but the errors he is making are those that feed into the worst sort of political mistakes.
Case in point, an offhand quote in
his most recent article:
To be fair, economics is a science of single instances, which means it
is hardly a science. And it is least like one when we most crave
certainty from it -- when there is a huge and unprecedented event and
educated guessing is the best anyone can do.
This sounds so wise and cynical, yet it is also so very wrong, and not just wrong, but wrong in the precise way that allows politicians to get away with nonsense such as piling on foolish "stimulus" packages despite the lack of success of each previous effort. Every event is in some way "unprecedented", but there are also regularities, and economics deals with those perfectly well, provided we understand what it is meant to do.
Economics may not be a "science" in the Newtonian mechanics sense. We cannot say "a 2% tax will cause prices to rise 3.74 cents", but it is a science in the general sense, one which allows us to say "taxing productive ventures to pay for government consumption will do more harm than good and here is how and why." For that matter, after Heisenberg, even physics lacks the certainty Mr. Will ascribes, at least around the margins. So he may be faulting economics for lacking the certainty that no modern science claims.
The problem is not economics, it is what others call economics. Between Keynesian pseudo-mathematics and the technocratic claims for the possibilities of quantitative methods, people have made claims about economics which go far beyond its ability to fulfill. It simply is not possible to manage volitional, non-mechanistic humans and their subjective valuations the same way one can manage a machine full of springs and cogs, or an ideal gas, or an oscillating, frictionless spring. Economics cannot give us precise answers, but it can provide us with general directions. It cannot tell us how big the stimulus should be, but it can tell us if there should be a stimulus at all, and if there is what the general, though not precise, outcomes will be. It can say "inflation of the money supply will make prices rise" but not "a 10% increase of the money supply will increase prices 12.5%". And no reasonable economist would claim it could.
But George Will ignores all that and instead acts as if the technocrats' definition were the only one, faulting economics for not being the ideal tool of big government the technocrats wish it were, and gets upset that it doesn't tell us how big to make an economically inappropriate stimulus.
As I said at the beginning, I think Mr. Will may have been in Washington a little too long.
POSTSCRIPT
For those interested in my argument against the use of quantitative methods in economics, see "
The Limits of Technocracy" , "
The Rubber Yardstick", "
Inflation and Uncertainty", "
The Limits of "Scientific" Management" and "
Mathematical Deception". For my general objections to Keynesian absurdities see "
Has No One Heard Of Lord Say?", "
Shopaholic Government", "
"Fair Trade"", "
Proof Keynes (and Krugman) Are Insane" and "
The Inflation Engine" as well as the many other posts cited in those articles. I admit there is a lot of overlap between the two, but that s because Keynesian theory lies at the base of most modern quantitative economics.