| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : FEBRUARY 1, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| READERS REPORT
For Economists, the Politics Is What Counts After All Every American undergraduate should read ''Even economists can't wait to spend a surplus'' (Economic Viewpoint, Jan. 18) about how to dispose of budget surpluses. Barro recalls the time when Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman was president of the American Economic Assn. (AEA). Friedman, too, had worried that his colleagues on the board might divert the then-budget surplus to ''someone's vision of a socially desirable activity.'' As Barro puts it, Friedman ''solved the problem by providing the members with an expensive new journal.'' Evidently, then, Friedman was not really worried about spending the surplus on a new benefit-in-kind. He merely worried that it would be spent on a vision other than his own. Remarkably, but predictably, Barro calls Friedman's cram-down solution ''relatively harmless.'' That judgment is predictable, because Friedman is idolized by economists of Barro's ideological persuasion. Just as predictably, however, he, Friedman, and other economists of their persuasion would ''despair'' if the AEA now devoted its budget surplus to the study of the education for inner-city children or, analogously, if the U.S. Congress used the current budget surplus to provide every American child with proper health care. That is fair enough, of course, because de gustibus non est disputandum. But it is just that: a matter of taste. Barro's piece illustrates a larger point that I seek to drum into my students' heads. Although economists prefer to think of themselves as scientists, their prescriptive analyses often are not scientific at all, but merely politics played in the guise of science. Uwe E. Reinhardt Professor Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Princeton University Princeton, N.J. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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