> Mr. Navarro holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.
When will we accept that economics is a bullcrap degree, even more so at the doctorate level?
When will we accept that economics is a bullcrap degree, even more so at the doctorate level?
America continuing to bet on anti-intellectualism is the problem. Popular railing against economics is what’s getting us into a recession.
Economics do not override politicians.
Are you referring to MMT [1]?
Because it’s not mainstream economics. And it never said you can run deficits without consequence, just that inflation is the limiting result. Which is technically true. But practically useless given the short-term interests of politicians.
Mainstream economics has cautioned against the national debt for decades. Idiots got pitched that economists don’t know what they’re talking about, meanwhile, and so that advice was ignored. Now we’ve gone full circle to blaming the field for the outcome it predicted.
It’s not, literally the first consequential term in the Wikipedia article is “heterodox,” but I’m curious where you came to believe this?
Mathematically valid. Genuinely interesting. An active field of research. But heterodox, and thus coming with a stable of armchair physicists who are drawn to it because it feels rebellious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
And the justifications given for most social policies come from MMT. Policy makers love MMT, especially progressive ones and ones who want to give out helicopter money. Economists seem cooler on the idea, but it's a mainstream theory among people making economic decisions.
MMT is mostly just Keynseanism taken to a sort of unintuitive but logical conclusion. It's not nearly as heterodox (using the English word) as something like Austrian economics.
Seriously, where are you getting this?
The first consequential word in the article! It’s literally a link to an article about heterodox economics [1]!
An economic theory described as part of "heterodox economics" can, in fact, be relatively mainstream given enough exposure and enough followers (which is where MMT is today). Conversely, parts of "mainstream economics" are relatively controversial and are thus heterodox ways of thinking.
If you think about "orthodox Christianity," the word "orthodox" says nothing about its popularity. The same goes for "heterodox economics."
Pretty much all monetary theories are parts of heterodox economics.
No. It cannot. This time I cite the literal first sentence of the Wikipedia definition of heterodox economics.
> all monetary theories are parts of heterodox economics
Not what heterodox or mainstream mean.
In that respect it's exactly as heterodox as Mises-style Austrian economics, which has similarly failed to persuade mainstream conservatives who share similar ideas about small states of its core ideas about gold standards and the futility of economic modelling...
I'm 61. I've been hearing this about the US national debt since I was a teenager. When do you imagine this "inevitable" currency collapse will occur? Do you consider the recent actions of the current administration to make it more or less likely?
I think the current administration isn't helping but we're talking about a multi-decade process here. Some of what we see today goes back to Bush and Obama policies. It also goes to geopolitical changes, China, India, Russia. Globalization. Technological changes. Climate change. etc. etc.
And yet ... various people, mostly republicans, have spent a good part of my lifetime telling us that the sky is about to fall in.
It may yet fall. But they are starting to seem more like boys that like to cry wolf than prophets.
Losing nuance is what gets you backlash. This is what happened in the pandemic and this is part of why we're paying a price now because nobody trusts anyone. And in the era of social media it's doubly easy to lose nuance.
Sure. But part of that nuance is scientific literacy. Treating the influencers who were once scientists as representative of the field is one of the roots of the problem. An influencer will never be nuanced—the medium doesn’t incentivise it.
> Navarro's views on trade are considered outside the mainstream of economic thought. ... According to Politico, Navarro's economic theories are "considered fringe" by his fellow economists. A New Yorker reporter described Navarro's views on trade and China as so radical "that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them."
> According to Lee Branstetter, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Navarro "was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system... He doesn't publish in journals. What he's writing and saying right now has nothing to do with what he got his Harvard Ph.D. in... He doesn't do research that would meet the scientific standards of that community." Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described a tax and trade paper written by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Trump as "a complete misunderstanding of international trade, on their part."
Tariffs as a tool to pivot towards an export focused economy isn’t a bad thing necessarily. But tools only help build things with a plan to guide them. Cooking up some formula with ChatGPT, printing a chart and taking a sweeping action is just dumb. It’s bad policy, bad implementation, bad leadership.
A smart leader would approach Canada and say “your tariffs and subsidy of onions are hurting our farmers”. A tariff is a tool that could neutralize that issue. The problem is, you need a smart leader and articulated vision.