February 17, 2014
It must be great to be a columnist for the Washington Post. You get to rewrite the same columns week after week. You never have to pay attention to facts and data or even make sure that you accurately present the arguments you criticize. Hence we have Robert Samuelson telling us this morning that “economists are in the dark.”
Of course he is in large part right. Given its colossal failure in recognizing the risks of the housing bubble it would be reasonable for every university to shut down its economics program, recognizing that it has about as much use as a department of astrology. But Samuelson is shooting blanks when he tells us that Keynesian economics has been proven a failure by the downturn.
“This conclusion is surely controversial because many economists attribute the weak recovery to misguided austerity, especially in Europe. Just follow the advice of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), they say. When the economy suffers a massive drop in private spending, government should offset the loss by increasing its budget deficits. Europe’s budget cuts were too aggressive, they say, while U.S. ‘stimulus’ policies were not aggressive enough.
“Perhaps history will vindicate this appeal to Keynesianism. Or perhaps not. The fact is that the United States did respond aggressively under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It certainly didn’t embrace austerity. Federal budgets ran massive deficits — $6.2 trillion worth from 2008 to 2013, averaging 6.4 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). Nothing like this had occurred since World War?II. Yet, the economy limped along. Why wasn’t this enough?”
Yes, well we have to keep Robert Samuelson away from the really big numbers, he might hurt himself. The reason it wasn’t enough is because the shortfall in demand created by the collapse of the housing bubble was even bigger, as some of us yelled at the time. The loss in residential construction was around 4 percentage points of GDP. The loss in consumption due to the loss of housing bubble generated wealth was also around 4 percentage points of GDP. Throw in another 1 percentage point each for the reduction in state and local government spending and non-residential construction and you’re up to 10 percentage points of GDP; that comes to almost 1.7 trillion in today’s economy.
If we sum that over 6 years we get more than $10 trillion and that’s before even factoring in any multiplier effects. So, $6.2 trillion is a really big number, but the actual shortfall in demand created by the collapse of the housing bubble was an even bigger number. And those of us who pay attention to the economy were saying this as loudly and clearly as we could at the time.
There is no problem with understanding the economy and figuring out how to turn it around. The problem is that the debate is dominated by people like Robert Samuelson who refuse to look seriously at the data and to listen to what the people he criticizes are saying.
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