September 10, 2010
In another fascinating piece of creative economics David Brooks tells us: “we can get distracted by short-term stimulus debates, but those are irrelevant by now.” Okay folks, just get used to 9.6 percent unemployment, Mr. Brooks says that there is nothing can be done.
The column is chock full of observations that most people did not know, probably because they are not true. For example, Brooks tells us that if more people follow the recommendation of Michelle Obama and go into teaching and service occupations then it will make the country poorer.
That’s an interesting thought. Would the country be worse off if most teachers came from the top quartile in their classes rather than further down the ladder? I certainly did not know this.
As for other service occupations, the country certainly could have used more competent and honest economists. We are losing more than $1.4 trillion a year (@$19,000 for a family of four) due to the recession caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If we had more competent economists, then the bubble never would have been allowed to grow to such dangerous levels. We can call this $19,000 in lost output a year the “incompetent economist tax.” (By way of comparison, toward the middle of next year the incompetent economist tax will exceed the size of the 75-year projected shortfall in the Social Security trust fund.)
Competent economists could make us richer in other ways. For example, we spend close to $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. These drugs would cost roughly one-tenth as much if patent monopolies did not allow drug companies to sell their drugs at prices far above their competitive market price. Competent economists could develop more efficient mechanisms for financing prescription drug research, thereby saving us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Even Mr. Brooks’ key concern, a lack of people going into engineering, could be addressed in large part of a bit of competent economics. Manufacturing in the United States is at an enormous competitive disadvantage because of the over-valued dollar. If the dollar is 30 percent over-valued, then it means that we are effectively providing a subsidy of 30 percent for imports and imposing a tariff of 30 percent on exports. As people who understand economics know, the over-valued dollar is the main reason that we have a trade deficit.
If we got the dollar down, then our manufacturing industry would be much more competitive. This would make careers in engineering more attractive relative to the alternatives. Then we would have more people entering engineering and David Brooks would be happy.
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