Professors Make More Than a Thousand Dollars an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers
propublica.org
propublica.org
If you have some spare cash, setting up a recurring monthly donation in any amount really helps them operate and plan for the future. I've added a subscription to the WaPo and recurring donations to ProPublica, ACLU, and The Marshall Project. This work is too important to neglect.
On a different matter involving trial lawyers and an industry group, they reported a "scandal" where there was none. I am familiar with that issue (so I have my own biases!). It was my opinion that they were repeating the trial lawyer's argument and calling that an investigative journalism piece. Others may disagree with my assessment. I do not want to link to that story here.
This is one reason why I choose not to financially support ProPublica.
EDIT: I'm getting sick of the downvotes on Hacker News. This is not reddit where a downvote == disagree. Just don't upvote it. It's frustrating to take a few minutes to write a comment and then watch it get nuked because it's "controversial". But please feel free to downvote away because my off-topic rant.
I'd argue that funding ProPublica and then funding an outfit who takes a contrary position on whatever issue is important to you is a better solution though. We need more journalism not less.
Sometimes they get involved in issues which seems like it would increase undesirable litigation. (of course people have differing opinions of what is undesirable).
But going further, sometimes laws are setup by congress which essentially 'outsources' enforcement to private parties. You can hold a good or bad opinion of the practice, or specific laws which are enacted, but in those areas, cases going to litigation can be the only way that the law is ever enforced.
The real problem today is most media today (and I don't include ProPublica in this) isn't even objective anymore. They're just biased, and engage in biased activism, with little objectivity and facts in its way.
Glenn Greenwald did an interview on this issue recently, which I think is worth watching for his perspective on this. Some may see Greenwald as "biased", but I think he's not only less biased than most "journalists" or pro-establishment figureheads on TV, but that more journalists should strive to be like him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
I found the media bias article on Wikipedia to be a good primer on types of bias to keep in mind while reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias#Types
It's also been useful in identifying which types of bias people refer to when they're talking about bias. I know I personally didn't have a system in place to categorize these things, and generally thought of only a few of them at a time.
Accurately reporting current events is an agenda.
So for a meaningful criticism, you need to point out how their agenda is pernicious or contrary to their stated purpose, not just complain that they have it.
'Balance' is often used as a cover for an agenda.
Think about it this way: I come across an article on XYZ site. I determine (or guess) that XYZ's agenda is generally conservative, and I consider myself a liberal. What do I do with that assessment? Do I stop reading and move on? Do I preemptively and summarily discount anything the article has to say? Or do I continue to read, perhaps skeptically, but nevertheless with an open mind?
I'd like to think we're doing the latter. But I'm not convinced.
My point is, it's totally fine to consider the source when making assessments of an article. It's totally fine to consider the source's agenda. But if seeking out the agenda becomes a routine, primary step in the process of consuming news, that worries me. That's essentially just seeking out confirmation of one's own biases as a reader.
If you strongly disagree with someone and care to correct them you should actually UPVOTE them. This way the public gets to learn the correct way/thinking/method. If you bury them many who may have the same wrong notion may not get the chance to be enlightened.
Hardly tired- biases and agendas caused the deep political divide in the U.S. and Brexit in England. While it's not news to those in the know, it's certainly not something we should hide or stop talking about.
Here's a study for you:
http://siepr.stanford.edu/highlights/sticking-script-rise-bi...
Why not? You say they did something wrong, but then do not cite to what it was other than saying it involved "trial lawyers and an industry group". Why not provide a link to go along with your opinion and let people read it and decide if they agree with you or not rather than insinuating impropriety?
Says who? Not the creator of this site, at least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
(Note: I personally don't downvote when I disagree, but I don't think there's an official position by the site)
Even without the cesspool of comments, I won't read Breitbart because the editorial quality is non-existant. Same goes for crapy left-wing blogs like RawStory.
It makes me pretty upset, because that is the study/article that everyone references when discussing that issue.
I am not American but after the US elections have decided to actively get involved in supporting progressives/liberals anyway I can.
They will be sorely needed...
This blurb, for instance, openly admits their expert opinions are for sale,
'Economists have an “incentive to get a reputation as someone who will make a certain type of argument. People will hire you because they know what testimony you will give,” said Robert Porter, an economist from Northwestern who has never testified on behalf of a corporation in an antitrust matter.'
"It is but equity...that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."
Nobody from inside of England could have written the book - it would be like a fish trying to explain water. But his underlying sympathies emerge in numerous places.
Is this your interpretation or based on Smithian scholarship? I've studied a fair bit of that and not run across this particular view.
Smith was born not long after England (whose per capita wealth was around 5x that of Scotland) took over Scotland. He lived during a period where England was building a worldwide trading empire, Scotland was benefiting from exposure to England, and the Industrial Revolution was just starting. Oh right, and two civil wars (the Jacobite rebellions) about whether Scotland wished to continued to be united with England.
A definite intellectual challenge for the Scots of the day was how it was that England, in every way seemingly worse than themselves, should be the ones in charge. Smith provided part of the answer.
England did not "take over" Scotland. There was no invasion or conquest, as in Ireland. The two countries voluntarily merged, scotland was represented in the British parliament and so on.
The Wealth of Nations is not weitten about England. Smith was describing the society around him, in Scotland, many of the examples given in the book are directly taken from his everyday observations in the central belt of Scotland.
At that time Scotland was in a tumult of intellectual and socialrevolution. Smith coukd look around and see the beginnings of an industrial society on his doorstep.
A better explanation for why Smith and other enlightenment figures were in scotland and not so much England would be local cultural factors, such as scottish presbytereanism making for an incredibly high literacy rate in scotland as compared to england, or the great abundance of universities in scotland compared to England.
Others are John Rae (1895), Edwin Cannen (1896), Francis Wrigley Hirst (~1910), Bagehot, and Emma Rothschild (various, ~1970s to present).
Also, Wikipedia: The socialist political movement includes a diverse array of political philosophies that originated amid the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 1700s
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards
the support of the government, as nearly as possible,
in proportion to their respective abilities; that is,
in proportion to the revenue which they respectively
enjoy under the protection of the state.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/tax-spending/adam-smith-and-p...
Progressive taxation is not socialism.
Moreover, in his day, common taxes were very, very low. Nobody had ever conceived of 20% 50% 60% taxation.
The plebes would riot with only a few % tax hike.
The USA was born out of a tax revolt of a measely few % that was frankly needed, for the protection of their own trade.
First of all, that's not true. Taxes in the early modern period are estimated to have been in the range of 15-20% of overall production, and rose significantly during industrialization.
But more importantly, most taxes in that period were typically assessed either as a fixed per-unit tax on the production or import of specific goods, or as a yearly fee for the possession of certain items. In this respect, they were quite different from modern income taxes -- it's hardly possible to compare them numerically.
It describes Supply and Demand in a mechanical way, illustrates the power of comparative value, the 'invisible hand' etc..
Smith was a Ethicist and a heavy duty Christian, and so he also realized how the system could be imbalanced, and definitely took the concerns of the plebes to heart etc..
But by no means was this a social treatise, or an attempt to validate social theory or 'socialism' (which didn't really exist).
And I think your comment about Scotland/UK is not true at all.
The 'Supply and Demand' bit that Krugman said 'all econs agree on' is really from Adam Smith.
Marx basically evaluated that in the context of the fact that some small group apparently had all the capital, while others had none, which creates an inherent power/class struggle and so it turns into a political issue.
Smith and Marx probably would have agreed on 'the problem' though almost surely not the solution :)
I've always thought the problem with the major economic systems isn't that either of them is inherently flawed, just that they haven't really even been implemented in a large enough scale for any decent period of time. In America we pay socialist taxes and get capitalist benefits, that's the problem. We have to pick one and commit to it.
There used to be a 'free market' it was called 'feudalism'.
Not quite, but almost.
If you believe in 'Adam Smith' then you understand under a totally free system, one person would end up with all the wealth.
Adam Smith was not a libertarian, or a 'laissez faire' kind of dude. He was an Ethicist and heavy duty Christian and to him capitalism was a moral issue.
Unlike the 'Chicago School' and Libertarian types who really state that corps exist for the shareholders, that's it, end of story.
As noted above, Smith invented progressive taxation.
Get this - do you know what Smith said the #1 quality of a CEO is?
Get this: 'Benevolence'
Not something you'd hear too often in America.
Onerous regulation is obviously a problem, and wasted taxation inefficient government is also a problem.
But there's no doubt they have to exist.
There's a 99.9% chance you'd be a serf were there to be a truly free and open, 'laissez faire' market. You wouldn't even have a chance at going to a good Uni. You know Trump's son-in-law, Kushner? He only got into Harvard after his parents gave $2.5M to the school. Maybe 1/3 Harvard students buy they way in. In a totally capitalist system, 100% of top spots would be 'bought' - industrialists want to ensure their legacy, and that their kids get into the top schools, and that would guarantee the longevity of their Empire.
Anyhow, that taxes can be too high and spent inefficiently does not mean they should not exit.
I think you're right in your assertion that the "dismal science" is cherry-picked to support a perspective, not unlike using hard science in the same way, but without the ability to reliably reproduce results.
That's why it is hard to take economists seriously. If economy is a science, then facts should establish themselves and economists should agree on more and more things. That does not seem to happen.
Take the statement "Lowering income taxes causes people to work more and in the end generates more revenue for the state". That theory has been put to test in many countries (like in the US during Reagan's presidency) but they still can't agree on if it is true or not. So how can economy be a science when empirical evidence doesn't cause facts to accumulate?
I recommend this article at The Atlantic about what economists agree on. It has citations to surveys of economists: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/4-politi...
Related but reductionist cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3117
And contrary to popular belief, economists would generally agree that certain facts have established themselves and been agreed upon. For example, subjective value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
This is an essential insight of economics, and one that was not really systematically grasped until recently (and still not grasped by the majority of the public.) It is as close to true as a sociological/ecological thesis can be, and is almost universally accepted. But because it is so accepted, you don't hear much about it.
What you're referring to is the Laffer curve - based on the observation that, at both 0% and 100% marginal tax rates, no tax revenue will be collected (none at 0% because no tax, essentially none at 100% because of disincentive.) That means that, in between those two end-points, there has to be a curve of some shape showing the total revenue collected, with a peak (or peaks) somewhere on it where revenue is maximized. The discussion is about where this peak is, and how the curve is shaped. To say "does lowering income taxes increase revenue" is an incomplete question: lower from what rate? Under what macroeconomic conditions? At what overall national wealth level? Interacting with what other taxes? Considering what conditions in capital markets? Etc, etc. Teasing out these huge numbers of other factors is the challenge of economic study, and why so many seemingly "simple questions" are unanswered: because they're not actually simple.
That's the point. Assuming the Laffer curve theory is correct, the question should be "what is the optimal tax rate?" That would mean that economists should propagate for the tax rate to be increased in some countries because it is too low and decreased in others. That's not what economists have been doing (if I'm wrong can you show me an economist favoring increasing taxes using the Laffer curve theory?) and instead they have only asked "how much lower should the tax rate be?"
Now the theory might be discredited, but I'm sure economists will come up with a new one to justify lowering taxes. :)
> Etc, etc. Teasing out these huge numbers of other factors is the challenge of economic study, and why so many seemingly "simple questions" are unanswered: because they're not actually simple.
But the questions aren't going unanswered. Politicians ask and economists do answer questions about tax rates, unemployment rates, interest rates, wage growth...
In climatology, at least the basic principles have been tested in laboratories; higher concentration of CO2 in air -> less reflected sunlight -> higher temperature. The Laffer curve theory was never tested in a laboratory, yet it was for decades trotted out as the truth by economists.
Here's a reasonably representative survey of US economists about the laffer curve: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/laffer-curve
Note what's happening here: most economists either think that a cut in federal income tax rates would lead to higher GDP, or are uncertain/think there's no effect. However, almost all also think that such tax cuts would not increase revenue - so any argument for tax cuts, according to these economists, is not based on the Laffer curve. Indeed, because of where these economists think US income tax rates are on the Laffer curve, they would have to agree, to be consistent, that increasing tax rates would increase revenue, on the margin. Therefore, the "Laffer curve consensus" among US economists is in fact the opposite of what your impression is.
> But the questions aren't going unanswered. Politicians ask and economists do answer questions about tax rates, unemployment rates, interest rates, wage growth... In climatology, at least the basic principles have been tested in laboratories; higher concentration of CO2 in air -> less reflected sunlight -> higher temperature. The Laffer curve theory was never tested in a laboratory, yet it was for decades trotted out as the truth by economists.
Politicians get certain answers to these questions from different economists, but they're definitely live issues in the field itself. Don't confuse the theory that Laffer curves exist - which is not controversial - with the argument that a particular tax regime is on a particular point of the curve - which is more uncertain. Just because you get an answer does not mean the question is definitively concluded.
And you can test the Laffer curve in a lab - but only with small numbers of people in a limited economic context. When you scale it up to a large number of people in a complex economy, the picture is much less clear and more complicated. (Likewise with climatology.) That's why it's hard!
Also, consider the following paper, written around the same time that people first started calling it the Laffer Curve (though the basic idea had been understood well before.): https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/c...
It's by David Henderson for Cato, who's quite in favour of cutting taxes. But rather than jump on the argument as a useful "justification" for doing so, he points out the numerous limitations of the model, and the possibility of unusual Laffer Curve shapes that would mean tax cuts would not "pay for themselves." Again - don't confuse the non-controversiality of the existence of a Laffer curve, with the actual controversy over where, on what kind of a curve shape, current policy is located. (And whether maximizing tax revenue is even the correct policy.)
You're acting as though "economists" are all of a mind on this issue - they aren't. They generally agree on some fundamental analytical tools, but come to a range of answers based on how they use them and what information they have.
Reducing taxes does cause people to work more. Whether it results in more revenue for the state depends on how much income tax was before and after the change. Elasticity of labour supply is not constant over all tax rates.
I know people like to crap on the Laffer curve but they crap on it because it's trivial if you have the barest knowledge of economics, not because it's false.
Macroeconomics is closer to the morass you describe but it still accumulates truth, if possibly depressingly slowly and with thirty year periods of regress. Microeconomics is on much firmer ground, in large part because they have more data and it's easier to accumulate it.
If you want a very readable introduction to price theory, which is a large part of microeconomics check out "Hidden Order" by David D. Friedman. It's based on his Price Theory textbook but rewritten for interest and readability. If you want something a bit more mathematically sophisticated, (basic calculus) look at Intermediate Microeconomics, Hal Varian.
Is there any evidence to back that statement up?
This is not the best example. When a panel of economists was asked whether "a cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut," none of them answered in the affirmative. 8% said they were "uncertain," and 71% either "disagreed" or "strongly disagreed." (5% answered "no opinion" and the rest didn't answer at all.) See: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/laffer-curve
If you don't take economists seriously, you might not notice when they agree on things.
Let's say you create some sort of giant monetary stimulus package. If the economy gets worse proponents will say "Whew! Just think how terrible things would have been without our stimulus package," and opponents will say "Things got worse because of the stimulus package!"
There's no way to know who's right. The best you can do is make imperfect models to encapsulate trillions of individual decisions people make. But that's not proof.
This has nothing to do with economics - that's how expert opinions work in law. It happens with all kids of expert opinions presented as testimony, from economics to medicine to cryptography.
Take a look at the way the expert opinions presented from both sides of the Newegg trial worked if you want to see jaw-dropping expert testimony action - Whitfield Diffie's own testimony on RSA (which he co-invented) was, a priori, given equal weight to the testimony of an expert hired by TQA. It was up to Newegg's and TQA's respective legal teams to convince the jury that Diffie's testimony was more mathematically sound than the other expert's testimony.
Most of economics is an intellectual veneer to justify politically motivated policy actions.
In practice? It's a little bit true. How many CS grads work at companies roughly in the sectors you mention? How many want to?
What a field is or is not about is not determined by what graduates of said field do or want to do post graduation.
theory and application BOTH define the field. it's an unfortunate tendency in academia to claim that _only_ the research/theory part is the field.
You obviously are an economist who has an extreme biased.
And no, I'm not an economist with "an extremely biased [sic]". I'm a supply chain engineer that has directly worked with dozens of economists for approximately 3 years, incorporated dozens of their econometric models into supply chain decision systems, and have never once have discussed anything political with them. And I just witnessed a clueless bullshitter malign the field of study that they have dedicated their lives to with an argument that could be considered libel at its most forgiving interpretation, and decided to call that clueless bullshitter out on it.
The ones doing actual actionable economics are publishing and working on policy in non-sexy journals you're never going to stumble across. Or working in invisible, non-controversial advisory roles.
So yes... the economists spend their lives _not actually doing economics anymore_ are probably pushing politically motivated actions. Shocking! Scandal!
Economists broadly want to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, corporate interest deductions, and reduce the corporate income tax, want employers to stop providing health insurance as an employment benefit (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/tax-reform, http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/healthcare), and broadly disfavor rent control (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control). Yet before we go off accusing economists of being right-wing shills, they also broadly want carbon taxes over income taxes (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/carbon-taxes-ii) and favor open immigration policies (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/high-skilled-immigrants).
None of these are particularly politically-fashionable positions to take, with the possible exception of the CIT issue, which plays well with one half of the electorate and is broadly viewed as liquid evil by the other half.
It's the trouble with people making equivalences between "a particular person calling themselves an economist" and "economics". There are hundreds of thousands of people with economics degrees, it is trivially easy to find one who says what you want to hear. But then, that economist's words are often taken to reflective of economics as an entire field of study - regardless of the reasoning behind it, or how many other economists actually agree. So most economists may have totally sensible reasons for supporting Policy A, but when one dissenting economist supports Policy Not-A, the "consensus view" gets ignored. I don't know why this is. Maybe because people feel competent to judge economic reasoning in a way that they don't with other fields (and which might lead them to seek more opinions.)
As an example, I have a Computer Science degree, however I can't imagine anyone taking what I have to say about Computer Science to be reflective of the greater industry. I'm just a schmuck with a degree.
Of course this phenomenon does happen in other fields too - think of how often there's an article where "science says x!", when in reality it's just one paper with a tentative conclusion. It just seems particularly common for people to misunderstand economics.
Economists are not intentionally supporting multinationals interests over people's interests. They do so as a side effect of their belief in the correctness and practical relevance of microeconomics and neo-classical theories. This behaviour is in turn encouraged and rewarded by multinationals and investment banks, leading dissenting voices to be marginalized. Of course there are notable exceptions, Stiglitz, Krugman, Rodrik, and a few others. But the general point is that if you want to get an economics PhD from a red brick university you will have to support this viewpoint.
There are also interesting differences in how economists view themselves compared to other humanities, see this (biased) paper: Fourcade et al, the Superiority of Economists http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.1.89 Economics tend to be a more insular and hierarchical discipline, and views itself as non-normative.
Which means that when economists have theories that fly in the face of what people believe (like pretty much all of science), people get more annoyed.
To me (like you), that suggests that GP is telling a just-so story about why we can ignore economists.
There's also the matter of the "rational actor" theory of human behavior, the a priori assumption of classical economics. It describes a being which is basically non-existent among flesh and blood humans. But corporations can form themselves in the image of this mythical economically rational being. And so, if classical economics does objectively describes the world, corporations are the uber-mensches of such a world and poised to dominate it in perpetuity - a clear incentive to capture and control the field, lest dissident economists succeed in espousing a revision of their core assumptions.
Regulation is inefficient, markets could be more efficient if they were markets with supply, demand and competition (which is clearly not the case in the emission markets at least not where I live)
> They favor open immigration policies because it brings flexibility to the job market. Leading to less job security for low skill workers and more profits for multinational companies.
This only happens if you start with an imbalanced market to begin with. If there is competition between the multinationals, then they are forced to decrease prices.
In other words, lower salaries result in lower prices which in turn benefit everybody, including and especially those low skilled workers that keep their job.
One way to make everybody richer is to decrease prices but this is basically overseen today and called the "deflation monster" even though it's a natural process due to tech advances.
> Economists are not intentionally supporting multinationals interests over people's interests. They do so as a side effect of their belief in the correctness and practical relevance of microeconomics and neo-classical theories.
Yes and these theories are IMO very misled and make no sense at all. Take even Krugman (the one I'm most familiar with) - he favors printing money to resolve an economic crisis caused by printing money. If that were the solution, we could all be rich by just printing our money and living happy ever after. See the problem?
Most economists today don't know what a market is and why it's superior, otherwise they wouldn't be in favor of a central bank. A Central bank basically practices price fixing for the market of money.
You highlight Stiglitz and Krugman as exceptions - but the fact that they won Nobels for their academic work suggests that economic theory itself does not directly lead to policy recommendations.
The former seems completely legit to me. The lawyers just need to look around for a witness that already has the opinion they prefer.
It's up to the people receiving the testimony to judge the credibility of the witness.
No scandal here.
> The former seems completely legit to me. The lawyers just need to look around for a witness that already has the opinion they prefer.
I agree with you, but think that it's important to distinguish "No scandal here" (your words) from "no problem" (an easy apparent synonym). Getting paid to espouse your honest opinions is (almost by definition!) not dishonest, but lending the lustre of academic support to fringe positions can lead to bad policy and decision-making. (The general public is, or even just non-academics and non-specialists are, not in a position to evaluate whether the paid opinion is representative of the academic consensus, or a fringe opinion held by a few; and, though the latter opinions have every right to be heard, it may be important to be aware of their status.)
This is completely unfair. 'Most of economics' is just academic, and has little to do with policy.
Moreover, there's absolutely nothing wrong with companies hiring economists to build models for things that interest them.
AT&T's acquisitions are mostly their business, and so long as the government does it's job, then there should be little concern.
The 'issue' should be the competence and ability of those green-lighting M&A.
If science had anything to do with it we would eventually see a consensus form after a sufficient amount of time regarding issues of monetary policy and other topics that are currently contested.
Check out the movie "Inside Job":
- Glenn Hubbard (the Dean of Columbia University School of Business). His work for Countrywide Financial for $1200/hr, attesting that the lender's loans were no worse than a control group of mortgages and not fraudulent, was examined by an attorney for MBIA. MBIA was suing Countrywide over its mortgage practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Hubbard_(economist)
- Frederic Mishkin, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, was paid almost $135,000 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce in 2006 to author a report that praised the stability of Iceland's economy and banking system—two years before they collapsed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Mishkin
Most of the profs in "elite" business schools sit on boards of big companies like GE, are members of Council on Foreign Affairs, etc.
Just sad.
The current system looks at merger decisions as a one time policy decision. It should take it up as an iterative exercise.
Is there any good way to solve it that won't result in less valid science work getting funded?
Bona fide science has peer review and falsifiability. Also imperfect, but nowhere nearly as commonly manipulated as is economics for hire by business interests and their think tanks.
In fact, this seems like a good time to mention the only Senator I've ever seen in decades of observing politics who actively attacks this problem is Elizabeth Warren.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-elizabeth-warren...
Every spending and tax law, for example, is scored by the Congressional Budget Office/Joint Committee on Taxation to determine the budgetary impact. Economists are hired to lobby these organizations about the "right" way to score policy, and then the organizations might or might not adjust their methodologies. Sometimes Congress can place pressure on the scoring organizations, too.
This would all be fine, except that neither the economic methodologies nor the data are publicly available. Sure, the big picture methodology is disclosed, but not the key assumptions.
If the economic methodologies were disclosed in full, I'd be all for outsiders suggesting ways to improve the methods. Then a scientific discussion could be carried out in public, and I think it would be obvious to anyone observing the process that the JCT or CBO economists are trying to do the best job that they can.
One step towards disclosing methods is through documentation, but given the importance of detail in the types of analyses that JCT and CBO do, supplemental documentation is unlikely to be sufficient. Instead, the organizations need to make their analytical code available. In other words, CBO and JCT should make their code available to the public and take outside suggestions for improvements. They should be open source!
Granted the data won't always be available to the public given that CBO and JCT rely on administrative data that is highly private, but they can at least produce dummy datasets and detailed summary statistics.
All of this same reasoning applies to the anti-trust situation. They ought to open source their analyses as well.
[Disclaimer, I'm a contributor to a few open source models for public policy analysis.]
I understand that jononor's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971712 was describing the most intellectually honest, rather than most profitable, approach; and in that capacity it's not clear, I think, that your objection is really an objection.
(I'd preferred to call my job something like "statistician focused on economics and finance" - not economist, but it didn't fit on the business card)
I just wanted to point out $1000 an hour pay is a quite common amount paid to any/all professions when law firms needs an outside expert opinion for a case.
This $ is not unique to company merger cases nor economists.
e.g. if a lawsuit needs a medical expert or engineering expert it's likely they are getting paid ~$1000 an hour for this time. And I don't doubt the clients are being billed way more than that - $1000 is just the expert's cut.
Not defending anything, just pointing out this amount is what law firms commonly pay for outside "professional expert" opinion work.
They wanted her to do some consulting for them, relevant to mergers, acquisitions and the result on oil prices.
She wanted to politely tell them no. So she quoted triple her normal hourly rate, already hundreds of $ per hour.
They said "sure" -- so she had to tell them no the old-fashioned way :)
According to this, obviously hearsay, Carlton truly wanted to argue that a merger was beneficial because shareholders won even though customers lost; this boggles the mind because the major intent of anit-trust law is to protect customers!
And at the end of the day, what makes you smart does not mean you're intelligent. Just because you can master a discipline to achieve your goal of extreme wealth accumulation is unimpressive. I feel that some day when money does not matter, rich people who actually created very little value (and may have even been a net negative) will be looked on as one of the great evils of society.
Also: In mergers, there is no "guilty or not". There is contract law, risk mitigation, strategy, and negotiation. Lawyers do so much more than simply saying what is "legal or illegal."
An economist need not be either a prof or an educator.
Tons of them work for banks, specialists just like devs, consultants, mathematicians, lawyers etc..
This is really a case study in how the morality of individuals in a country determines the fate of the country.
The issue is academics cashing in on their research. I think this is fine in general. Having been through grad school I've worked with professors who I felt placed their entrepreneurial endeavors ahead of their educational requirements. This is an ugly practice. Ethical standards need to be in place to address this. If you're primarily conducting business using your academic credentials, then relinquish your chair to someone else, and take up some "fluff" title and pay your grad students out of your own kitty. Also, pay the university for the non-human resources you use, because it's like you're a hairstylist renting a chair in a salon to obtain and service clients.
I think this is primarily the reason why there's a generation of postdocs sitting on the sidelines waiting for a full professorship. They eventually get bored (and hungry) and move into the private sector, robbing academia of fresh blood and new ideas. So a de facto privatization of research emerges. We all lose when this gets out of hand.
This may be fair to ask of the professor, but it is perhaps reasonable to consider whether it is fair to ask of his or her graduate students (who are probably not to be blamed for their advisors' extracurricular habits). I work in math, where corporate sponsorship is (generally) not an issue, and so my opinion may be skewed; but it seems to me that a graduate student of someone with a 'fluff' title might be perceived less seriously than a graduate student of someone with a grander academic title, and so suffer even if his or her work is sterling. (On the other hand, perhaps driving students away from working with corporate consultants is a desireable side effect …?)
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...