As a lifelong economist, I am distraught at what is happening to my profession. What I observe is economists losing status. Economists used to be highly respected figures, and nowadays, even when they are not pilloried, they are often simply ignored. There is an ongoing bipartisan flight from economic reasoning. And as voters go to the polls this week, neither Republicans nor Democrats are offering anything like a rigorous plan for economic growth.
If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur Okun, Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley, Otto Eckstein, and Walt Rostow into government. Those were all names with significant academic heft who could count among the world’s leading macroeconomists. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson served as a consultant to the government. Heller and some of the others helped to shape the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964.
That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent. Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet. With the Cold War raging, Americans felt their government had to get it right.
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Most of this respect was still in place by the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan appointed Martin Feldstein to chair his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Feldstein being a Harvard professor and one of the leading market-oriented economists of his time. Two of the junior economists working for Feldstein were Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers—before they became famous, but the intellectual firepower was already there. Michael Mussa and William Niskanen were other notables in the administration, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek were standing sources of inspiration.
