From the beginning, X has sought out academic economists, rather than lawyers or former White House aides. His first economic adviser, Y, is a young University of Chicago professor who shares X’s market-oriented [Party] views. This summer, X added Z, who has a more traditional background ... but he, too, has a Ph.D. in economics, from Harvard.
As anyone who has spent time with X knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Y’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, X was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets. What tends to distinguish [Party] economists is that they set out to uncover imperfections of the market and then come up with incremental, market-based solutions to these imperfections. This helps xplain the X campaign’s interest in behavioral economics, a relatively new field that has pointed out many ways in which people make irrational, short-term decisions. To deal with one example of such myopia, X would require companies to automatically set aside a portion of their workers’ salary in a 401(k) plan. Any worker could override the decision — and save nothing at all or save even more — but the default would be to save.
In the beginning, there were institutions...thoughts on institutions, economics and other random topics.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Name that Candidate
Who is the New York Times describing here?
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