Comment by ravenscrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenscrow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> “The essence of this strategy is to take tax policy out of the hands of experts and entrust it to activists. These campaigns do not usually have much credibility with card-carrying economists. ”

When it comes to economics and religion, the "experts" and activists tend to be one and the same and neither seems to be credible.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec...

One of our the "greatest experts" predicted eternal collapse of the markets after trump's election

"If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never."

and an endless global recession.

"So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight."

> This lag between economic policy and outcomes is a big reason the US has such a disingenuous public debate.

Economic policy doesn't cause recessions. The business cycle and the FED raising and lowering interests cause recessions. No matter the economic policies, there will always be a recession. I believe it was jamie dimon who said we usually get one every 8 to 10 years.

No, there are actually experts that we should rely on. Of course no economist is a perfect predicter- predicting the future is hard.

Tom Nichols’ book The Death of Expertise is relevant here.

——

As for your specific points: - Paul Krugman, on his major predictions, has been incredibly prescient. He was talking about media bothsidesism, a major reason for this political moment, in 1999. He said America was being lied into war in Iraq in 2002. He predicted the effects of stimulus in America and Europe. The guy is a genius and so he becomes a target for his political enemies. (Re the stock prediction: he withdrew this in a few days. It was a minor prediction. The predictions above were long term predictions.) The issue is that conservative economics has been captured by the conservative propaganda machine which amplifies minor corrected predictions like this while ignoring the huge long term mistake that the right’s “economists” made about inflation in response to stimulus.

- The business cycle causes recessions, yes. Not sure what you mean by economic policy. But both monetary and fiscal (tax) policy has big effects on entry and exit from recession. And also public debt affects provision of public policies like the social safety net.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com