Zoning common sense

Kate Kershaw Downing has posted a worthy letter of resignation from the Palo Alto Housing commission, that seems to be going viral.

Palo Alto is absurdly expensive. People who want to come here for jobs can't afford to live anywhere nearby.  What to do about it?

 I have repeatedly made recommendations to the Council to expand the housing supply in Palo Alto so that together with our neighboring cities who are already adding housing, we can start to make a dent in the jobs-housing imbalance that causes housing prices throughout the Bay Area to spiral out of control. Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

Summers on growth and stimulus

Larry Summers has an important, and 95% excellent, Financial Times column. Larry is especially worth listening to. I can't imagine that if not a main Hilary Clinton adviser he will surely be an eminence grise on its economic policies. He's saying loud and clear what they are, so far, not: Focus on growth.

Federalization of Labor

We are getting a good hint that a centerpiece of economic policy in the Hillary Clinton administration will be an increase in Federal control over labor markets.

The news here is that serious economists are advocating these policies, not just to transfer income from one to another, reduce inequality, help specific groups, or enhance some sense of social justice, at the expense of dynamism and growth, but that more Federal control of the labor market will increase wages, productivity and economic growth for everyone!

Alan Blinder's cogent Aug 2 Wall Street Journal opinion piece gives a good sense of the language and logic,

... Hillary Clinton has presented an extensive list of policies that would raise wages, starting with a higher minimum wage. ...

Mrs. Clinton also advocates widespread profit-sharing as a way to put more money into workers’ pockets. She would promote that goal both by using the presidential bully pulpit and by providing tax incentives for businesses that share profits. Since the scholarly evidence suggests that profit-sharing raises productivity, such tax breaks will partly pay for themselves.

Increased vocational training and apprenticeships for the non-college-bound are also major Clinton policies....The U.S. can increase its productivity and reduce inequality by ensuring that the right people get vocational training and apprenticeships.

And then there is what may be the surest way to raise wages over the long run: providing pre-K education for all American children....

Labor market intervention is getting wrapped up in "stimulus," as reported in an excellent Bloomberg column by Brendan Greeley here,

 "It’s really simple," she said at a rally in June in Ohio. "Higher wages leads to more demand, which leads to more jobs, which leads to higher wages." ...

When Clinton uses the word "demand" on the stump, she’s blowing a dog whistle. (Economists have them, too.) Increase demand, she’s saying, and you get growth.... 

Bob Gordon signs on reluctantly,  

"I think it’s a very marginal way of promoting economic growth," says Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University who specializes in the subject. Like Summers, he prefers a massive investment in infrastructure. But he does agree that a shift in business income away from profits and toward salaries would create growth. Workers are more likely to buy things from their paychecks than businesses are to invest out of their profits.

Alan Krueger ["former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and an informal adviser to the Clinton campaign," and candidate for vice-president of the American Economic Association] agrees wholeheartedly:

... "I think the time could be right for a more virtuous growth model," he said, "which is driven by stronger wage growth...more consumption, more demand, creating more jobs." 

Novel rationalizations for decades-old policies are always suspect. And the usual passive or verb-less sentences hiding the heavy hand of Federal government always invites skepticism.

But let's take it seriously. How much sense do these analyses make?

Without rehashing the whole minimum-wage fight, it is worth asking, if the Federal Government forces businesses to raise some people's wages, but others become unemployed as a result, whether that really count as raising wages overall?

The words "presidential bully pulipit" has poor overtones in the current age. The bully pulpit means the DOJ, EEOC, IRS, NLRB, EPA and who knows even the fish and wildlife service may come calling if you don't do what the president wants. Schoolyard bully, not Teddy Roosevelt's jolly-good pulpit.

"The scholarly evidence indicates that profit-sharing raises productivity.." That's a new twist on the abominable "studies show" argument by reference to vague authority.  But even "scholarly evidence" has to make some sense.

It does make sense that firms which study the question and choose profit-sharing plans can thereby raise productivity, either by giving their employees better incentives or by attracting different and more productive employees. They would not do it otherwise.

But this classic subject-free sentence is about Federal Regulations to force profit-sharing that "puts money into workers' pockets" on all firms. It does not follow that such a mandate will have the same effect. This is the classic, "rich guys drive BMWs, so if we force BMW to give cars away we'll all get rich."

To belabor the obvious, that some firms choose it because they see it will work does not mean that the Federal Government forcing it on all firms will work.  That profit sharing which increases workers' incentives can work does not mean that reducing profits and paying lump sums to workers will work. That profit sharing accompanied by greater selection of productive workers works does not mean that forced profit sharing will work for everyone -- someone employs the less productive, I hope.

If it's about incentives, then there should be a widespread Federal initiative to promote piece-work, commissions rather than salaries, independent contractors rather than employees... Hmm, we're headed the other way.

As economists, we are supposed to start with a problem. What is the market failure that stops companies form putting in productivity enhancing profit sharing programs? Or are they just too dumb and need the benevolent hand of the "bully pulpit" to educate them?

"Increased vocational training and apprenticeships for the non-college-bound," are more Orwellian subject-less sentences. Who is going to do this increasing and how? What is the market failure? Do we need to have triple digit numbers of Federal Job-training programs?

"Providing pre-k education" is another subject-free sentence. I presume he does not mean reducing regulations and union requirements so more pre-k schools can start up! That might actually be effective. But perhaps it is technically correct: a large Federal subsidy for pre-k education, funneled through the public school systems and teacher's unions will raise someone's wages. The "scholarly evidence" is not that it will be the kids.

The idea that forcing companies to pay out greater wages is the key to "stimulus," and that demand-side "stimulus" is the key to long-run growth is...er... even more novel economics.

In classic Keynesian stimulus, there is something about the government borrowing money and spending it, or giving it to consumers to spend, that causes people to forget that the borrowed money must be paid back someday. Not here -- this is directly the claim that taking from Peter and giving to Paul is the key to prosperity. And not just temporary stimulus, but long run growth.

One of many fallacies at work here is the notion that companies face a choice between "paper" investment and "real" investment; that by piling up cash reserves they are somehow diverting resources that could be "real demand" into "paper investments." But every paper asset is a paper liability, so this possible truth about an individual company makes no sense for an economy as a whole.

And let's follow the logic.  If this works for stimulus and growth, force companies to give away cash to consumers. Consumers are, well, people who like to consume. Force them to give cash away to thieves. They consume quickly.  If this is a bad idea.. well then maybe the whole "stimulus" thin is a bit of bunk as well.

Gordon at least has the decency to belittle the idea. And on "a shift in business income [another subjectless sentence -- this shift is forced by the Federal Government!] away from profits and toward salaries would create growth"  because "Workers are more likely to buy things from their paychecks than businesses are to invest out of their profits," one can hope that a statement which violates basic accounting is a misquotation.

 Krueger has less defense: "a more virtuous growth model,...which is driven by stronger wage growth...more consumption, more demand, creating more jobs" is a direct quote. It may be "virtuous" to feel this way, but the classic criticism of Democratic economic policy is doing things that make you feel good but don't work.

Well maybe, maybe not. Economics is a work in progress. But it is certainly brand-new, made-up-on-the spot economics, designed to buttress policies decided on for other reasons.

A last grumpy comment. The WSJ titled Blinder's oped, "Only one candidate can make wages grow again."  Actually I agree with the sentence   Like most media they forgot there are more than two candidates!

Blueprint for America

"Blueprint for America" is a collection of essays, organized, edited and inspired by George P. Shultz. You can get an overview and chapter by chapter pdfs here. The hardcover will be available from Amazon or Hoover Press October 1.

Some of the inspiration for this project came from the remarkable 1980 memo (here) to President-elect Ronald Reagan from his Coordinating Committee on Economic Policy.

Like that memo, this is a book about governance, not politics.  It's not partisan -- copies are being sent to both campaigns. It's not about choosing or spinning policies to attract voters or win elections.

The book is about long-term policies and policy frameworks -- how policy is made, return to rule of law, is as important as what the policy is --  that can fix America's problems. It focuses on what we think are the important issues as well as policies to address those issues -- it does not address every passion of the latest two-week news cycle.

The book comprises the answers we would give to an incoming Administration of any party, or incoming Congress, if they asked us for a policy package that is best for the long-term welfare of the country.

The chapters, to whet your appetite:

How to raise GDP 10%, and reduce inequality too

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti have a very nice new working paper "Why do Cities Matter?"

..increased wage dispersion lowered aggregate U.S. GDP by 13.5%  Most of the loss was likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Lowering regulatory constraints in these cities to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%. 

Roughly, the same worker, working the same job, in San Jose or San Francisco, earns double what he or she earns somewhere else in the country.  Here is their plot of wages across cities:

Sure: Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti

The right tail there isn't just missing -- it was absent in 1964. There weren't any cities (MSA's) with 50% higher wages than average in 1964. That's New York, San Francisco and San Jose now.

What does this have to do with growth?

WSJ growth oped -- full version

WSJ Oped. Now that 30 days have passed, I can post the whole thing. Previous post.

Ending America’s Slow-Growth Tailspin

Sclerotic growth is America’s overriding economic problem. From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% annually. Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate—1.76%. Even in the years since the bottom of the great recession in 2009, which should have been a time of fast catch-up growth, the economy has only grown at 2%. Last week’s 0.5% GDP report is merely the latest Groundhog Day repetition of dashed hopes.

The differences in these small percentages might seem minor, but over time they have big consequences. By 2008, the average American was more than three times better off than in 1952. Real GDP per person rose from $16,000 to $49,000. And those numbers understate the advances in the quality of goods, health and environment that came with growth. But if U.S. growth between 1950 and 2000 had been the 2% of recent years, instead of 3.5%, income per person in 2000 would have risen to just $23,000, not $50,000. That’s a huge difference.

Looking ahead, solving almost all of America’s problems hinges on re-establishing robust economic growth. Over the next 50 years, if income could be doubled relative to 2% growth, the U.S. would be able to pay for Social Security, Medicare, defense, environmental concerns and the debt. Halve that income gain, and none of those spending challenges can be addressed. Doubling income per capita would help the less well off far more than any imaginable transfer scheme.

Ideas had sex

Adam Smith. Source: WSJ

Why are we so much better off than our ancestors? Why did this process only start where and when it did, in Western Europe, not in Rome or China?

Deirdre McCloskely has an excellent essay in the Saturday Wall Street Journal Review.

Her answer: "Ideas started having sex," a glorious sentence she attributes to Matt Ridley.

"The idea of a railroad was a coupling of high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea for a lawn mower coupled a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical reaper. "

And so on. She is exactly right. We tend to focus on the original idea, the basic science. That's necessary, but 99% of growth comes from elaboration, implementation, and the marriage of ideas -- sex in the sense of genes combining and making new things.

What's the bar for these hookups?

The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious.

Also,

...equality. ...not an equality of outcome... equality before the law and equality of social dignity.

Though, as she points out at length, the social dignity, property rights, and equality of entrepreneurs has always been a dicey matter.

Regulations and Growth

Bentley Coffey, Patrick McLaughlin, and Pietro Peretto have an interesting new paper on The Cumulative Cost of Regulations. They attack two of the big problems in quantifying the effect of regulations on the economy.

First, measurement. To get past regulatory horror stories,  just how do we measure the problem? They use the Mercatus Center's new RegData database, which is based on textual analysis of the Federal Register.

Second, functional form. How should we relate regulations to output? Here they use a detailed industry growth model. You may object, as to any model, but at least the mechanisms are explicit and you can choose different ones if you want. (I haven't plowed through all the equations, and am interested to hear comments from those of you who have.)

Third, estimation. They use the variation in industry outcomes related to differential regulation of those industries to estimate the  effects of regulation on investment.

The bottom line is pretty startling:

Economic growth in the United States has, on average, been slowed by 0.8 percent per year since 1980 owing to the cumulative effects of regulation:

If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012.

This means that in 2012, the economy was $4 trillion smaller than it would have been in the absence of regulatory growth since 1980. This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita,...

 A graphical summary:

(It's interesting that the standard errors are so weighted to the up side. I checked with the authors, this is indeed how the distributions of uncertainty work out in their estimation.)

I also found this nice graph from Chad Jones,

Chad's graph differs from mine for a few reasons. First, his index of "social infrastructure" from the world bank is more comprehensive, including Accountability of politicians, Political stability, Government effectiveness, Regulatory quality, Rule of law, Control of corruption. Second, he has total factor productivity on the Y axis. The vertical axis is a log scale, so read carefully. 1.6 (Singapore) is a lot more than 1.0, though they are compressed on the graph.

Global Imbalances

I gave some comments on “Global Imbalances and Currency Wars at the ZLB,” by Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas at the conference, “International Monetary Stability: Past, Present and Future”, Hoover Institution, May 5 2016. My comments are here, the paper is here 

The paper is a very clever and detailed model of "Global Imbalances," "Safe asset shortages" and the zero bound. A country's inability to "produce safe assets" spills, at the zero bound, across to output fluctuations around the world. I disagree with just about everything, and outline an alternative world view.

A quick overview:

Why are interest rates so low? Pierre-Olivier & Co.: countries can't  “produce safe stores of value”
This is entirely a financial friction. Real investment opportunities are unchanged. Economies can’t “produce” enough pieces of paper. Me: Productivity is low, so marginal product of capital is low.

Why is growth so low? Pierre-Olivier: The Zero Lower Bound is a "tipping point." Above the ZLB, things are fine. Below ZLB, the extra saving from above drives output gaps. It's all gaps, demand. Me: Productivity is low, interest rates are low, so output and output growth are low.

Data: I Don't see a big change in dynamics at and before the ZLB. If anything, things are more stable now that central banks are stuck at zero. Too slow, but stable.  Gaps and unemployment are down. It's not "demand" anymore.

Delong and Logarithms

Brad Delong posted a response to my oped on growth  in the Wall Street Journal. He took issue with my graph, reproduced here,

by making his own graph, here

He characterizes the difference between our graphs with his usual gentlemanly restraint,

"Extraordinarily Unprofessional!!:" "total idiocy" The University of Chicago and the Wall Street Journal Have Very Serious Intellectual Quality Control Problems

and so forth.

If you read Brad, you may wonder what skulduggery I used to make the plot. I will now reveal the dark secret. It's a clever Chicago-school mathematical trick:

Logarithms.

Growth Interview

I did a short interview with the WSJ's Mary Kissel about my growth oped. If you can't see the embed above, try this direct link or this one. 

WSJ Growth Oped

I did an oped on growth in the Wall Street Journal, titled "Ending America’s Slow-Growth Tailspin." I'll post the full thing here in 30 days.

Blog readers will recognize a distilled version of my longer essay on growth (blog post here, html here,   pdf here), and the graph from Smith v. Jones blog post. I think out loud. The growth essay is much more detailed on diagnosis and especially on policy.

There are three basic ideas (two too many for a good oped).

1) Growth is everything. Increasing growth will do way more for every problem you can name than anything else on the economic agenda. Even if workers in 1910 could have taken all of Rockefeller's wealth, they would have been disastrously poor compared to today.

2) Can policies actually improve growth? The tut-tutters mocked Jeb Bush's 4% aspiration. I outline the "we've run out of ideas" school of thought, most recently in Bob Gordon's thoughtful book; the "everything is right but the zero bound" secular-staglation school, and the view that the growth giant is being held back by a liliputian army of politicized regulators.

As evidence,  I improved on the graph from an earlier post of the World Bank's ease of doing business score vs. GDP per capita,

Gordon on growth 2

PBS covers Bob Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth.



[Embedded video. These aren't picked up when other sources pick up the blog, so come back to the original if you don't see the video.]

PBS and Paul Solman did a great job, especially relative to the usual standards of economics coverage in the media.  OK, not perfect -- they livened it up by tying it to partisan politics a bit more than they should have, though far less than usual.

I don't (yet, maybe) agree with Bob. I still hope that the mastery of information and biology can produce results like the mastery of electromagnetism and fossil fuels did earlier. I still suspect that slow growth is resulting from government-induced sclerosis rather than an absence of good ideas in a smoothly functioning economy.  But Bob has us talking about The Crucial Issue: long term growth, and its source in productivity. The 1870-1970 miracle was not about whether the federal funds rate was 0.25% higher or lower. And the issue is not about opinions, like the ones I just offered, but facts and research, which Bob offers.

The issue of future long-term growth is tied with the issue of measurement, something else that Bob has championed over the years. GDP is well designed to measure steel per worker. Information, health and lifespan increases are much more poorly measured. This is already a problem in long-term comparisons. In the video, Bob points to light as the greatest invention. The price of light has fallen by a factor of thousands since the age of candles, to the point where light consumption is a trivial part of GDP. It's a worse problem as all the great stuff becomes free. I suspect that we'll have to try to measure consumer surplus not just the market value of goods and services.

And congratulations to Bob. The economics profession tends to focus on the young rising stars, but he offers inspiration that economists can produce magnum opuses of deep impact at any point in a career.

Disclosure: I haven't read the book yet, but it is on top of the pile. More when I finish. Ed Glaeser has an excellent review.

Update: Tyler Cowen's review, in Foreign Affairs

Institutions and experience

These are remarks I prepared for a symposium at Hoover in honor of George Shultz on his 95th birthday. Willie Brown was the star of the symposium, I think, preceded by a provocative and thoughtful speech by Bill Bradley.

Institutions and Experience

Our theme is “learning from experience.” I want to reflect on how we as a society learn from experience, with special focus on economic affairs. Most of these thoughts reflect things I learned from George, directly or indirectly, but in the interest of time I won’t bore you with the stories.

An English baron in 1342 tramples his farmers’ lands while hunting. The farmers starve. Then, insecure in their land, they don’t keep it up, they move away, and soon both baron and farmers are poor.

How does our society remember thousands of years of lessons like these? When, say, the EPA decides the puddle in your backyard is a wetland, or — I choose a tiny example just to emphasize how pervasive the issues are — when the City of Palo Alto wants to grab a trailer park, how does our society remember the hunter baron’s experience?

The answer: Experience is encoded in our institutions. We live on a thousand years of slow development of the rule of law, rights of individuals, property rights, contracts, limited government, checks and balances. By operating within this great institutional machinery, these “structures” as senator Bradley called them last night, these “guardrails” as Kim Strassel called them in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, our society remembers Baron hunter’s experience in 1342, though each individual has forgotten it.

Smith meet Jones

A while ago I wrote up a smorgasbord of policies that I thought could increase US economic growth, at least for a few decades, in "Economic Growth" (pdf, html here.) Noah Smith took me to task in a Bloomberg View column, complaining that I confused growth with levels,

...I want to focus on one bad argument that Cochrane uses. Most of the so-called growth policies Cochrane and other conservatives propose don't really target growth at all, just short-term efficiency. By pretending that one-shot efficiency boosts will increase long-term sustainable growth, Cochrane effectively executes a bait-and-switch.

As it turns out, the difference between "growth" and "level" effects in growth theory and facts is not so strong. Many economists remember vaguely something from grad school about permanent "growth" effects being different and much larger than "level" effects.  It turns out that the distinction is no longer so clear cut; "growth" is smaller and less permanent than you may have thought, and levels are bigger and longer lasting than you may have thought.

Along the way, I offer one quantitative exercise to help think just how much additional growth the US could get from the sort of free-market policies I outlined in the essay.

Part I Growth and Levels 

A quick reply: China.

Hounded out of business II

Nathaniel Popper at the New York Times Dealbook, writes "Dream of New Kind of Credit Union Is Extinguished by Bureaucracy" It's a worthy addition to the series of anecdotes on how regulation, especially discretionary actions of regulators, are killing investment and businesses.

Again, we collect anecdotes as a challenge to measurement. There is no data series on numbers of businesses driven away by regulation. Yet.

This is a good anecdote, as it illustrates a too little reported underbelly of financial regulation.

Mr. Kahle saw how hard it was for the employees at his firm to obtain loans, and more broadly, how the existing financial system had helped contribute to the financial crisis. He thought he could do things differently, and he aimed to prove it when he began applying to open a credit union in early 2011.

Since then, the credit union has faced a barrage of regulatory audits and limitations on its operations, ...Now, Mr. Kahle is giving up on his dream of creating a new kind of bank, ...

...the troubles faced by his Internet Archive Federal Credit Union point to how difficult it can be to try out anything new in the heavily regulated industry.

Davis on Regulation and More

Steve Davis has a thoughtful speech on regulation, policy uncertainty, and above all the need for simplicity.  (On the policy uncertainty website).  A few excerpts:

... the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which compiles all federal regulations in effect each year...grew nearly eight-fold over the past 55 years, reflecting tremendous growth in the scale and complexity of federal regulations. At 175,000 pages, the CFR contains as many words as 130 copies of the King James Bible.  While Ten Commandments sufficed for the Hebrew God of the Old Testament, the CFR contains about one million commandments in the form of “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “prohibited,” and “required.”...

The size and complexity of the U.S. tax code also grew dramatically in recent decades. As of 2011, it takes 70,000 pages of instructions to explain the federal tax code (McCaherty, 2014). The code has about four million words and 67,000 sections, subsections and cross-references. It’s all crystal clear if you read the instructions carefully. ...

And the best paragraph:

The good Catholic Sisters who saw to my moral instruction in primary school devoted many hours to the Ten Commandments. They wanted my classmates and me to avoid sins. Their success in that regard is in doubt. But at least the Sisters could be confident that we did not sin out of ignorance or uncertainty. How they would have instructed us on one million commandments, I do not know. The delinquents in my school found it hard to absorb a mere ten....

An essay. It's an overview of what a growth-oriented policy program might look like. Regulation, finance, health, energy and environment, taxes, debt social security and medicare, social programs, labor law, immigration, education, and more. There is a more permanent version here and pdf version here. This version shows on blogger, but if your reader mangles it, the version on my blog or one of the above will work better.

I wrote it the Focusing the presidential debates initiative. The freedom of authors in that initiative to disagree is clear.

Economic Growth

Growth is central

Sclerotic growth is the overriding economic issue of our time. From 1950 to 2000 the US economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% per year. Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate, 1.7%. From the bottom of the great recession in 2009, usually a time of super-fast catch-up growth, it has only grown at two percent per year.² Two percent, or less, is starting to look like the new normal.

Small percentages hide a large reality. The average American is more than three times better off than his or her counterpart in 1950. Real GDP per person has risen from $16,000 in 1952 to over $50,000 today, both measured in 2009 dollars. Many pundits seem to remember the 1950s fondly, but $16,000 per person is a lot less than $50,000!

If the US economy had grown at 2% rather than 3.5% since 1950, income per person by 2000 would have been $23,000 not $50,000. That’s a huge difference. Nowhere in economic policy are we even talking about events that will double, or halve, the average American’s living standards in the next generation.

Even these large numbers understate reality.

Two for growth

I saw two very nice, short views on growth: John Taylor Can We Restart This Recovery All Over Again? and Andy Atkeson, Lee Ohanian, and William E. Simon, Jr., 4% Economic Growth? Yes, We Can Achieve That.

John gets the art prize

Andy, Lee and William get the boil-it-down-to-basics prose prize

 Safety-net policies should not discourage work through high implicit tax rates resulting from means-tested programs. Regulatory policies should not erect barriers to competition and raise costs. Education policies should expand competition and reward the most successful teachers. Immigration policies should expand the number of skilled workers and immigrant entrepreneurs. And tax policies should simplify the tax code, reduce business and personal marginal income tax rates and broaden the tax base.

For better or worse?

Three recent news items and blog posts make a provocative contrast:

Paul Krugman, New York Times,  "The MIT Gang"

It’s actually surprising how little media attention has been given to the dominance of M.I.T.-trained economists in policy positions and policy discourse.... 

James Bartholomew, The Spectator, "British economics graduates have left a trail of misery around the world"

"... the trendy doctrines of our universities have much to answer for" 

(A list that in terms of needless human suffering, is pretty astounding)

Yannis Palaiologos, Politico, Beware of American econ professors!  

World-famous economists — men of Nobel prizes and stellar academic accomplishment — have provided intellectual cover to radicals who appeared at best to be willing to take a stupendously reckless gamble with Greece’s financial, political and geopolitical future, 

To belabor the obvious: Be careful what you wish for.