More the Sanders/Friedman debate with critics. Baiman contends that the CEA group puts forward an argument from authority. But that is not all there is to it.
Bernie’s economic program is exposing the long politically dormant deep fissure within economics between generally “progressive” economists who still broadly adhere to mainstream Neoclassical (NC) economic theory and “radical” economists who have long rejected core NC theory. I don’t know Prof. Friedman personally but he teaches at one of the five “heterodox,” or “radical” in U.S. economics parlance, Ph.D. granting economics departments in the U.S. The “radical” moniker stems from the name of the major professional organization of left leaning heterodox economists in the U.S. – the “Union for Radical Political Economics” (URPE). Jamie Gailbraith is a prominent Post-Keynesian heterodox economist. In contrast, the four former CEA Chairs all teach in mainstream NC economics departments that reject heterodox economics as unscientific value-laden deviance. To be fair the CEA foursome are known as political liberals who, like Paul Krugman, another generally progressive NC economist, have often been stalwart supporters of politically progressive economic policies and principles, using data analysis that is indistinguishable for all practical purposes from that employed by radical economists. But this time apparently, the structural economic changes that Sanders is proposing have simply gone too far for them.
The CEA’s blanket argument is that economic outcomes that have not occurred in the recent past are not possible. This reminds one of the, similar, refusal of the vast majority of NC economists to contemplate the 2008 crash because this had never happened in recent history, and the optimistic estimates of the CEA, based on the average of post-war recessions, of the impact of the woefully inadequate Obama stimulus. I believe that the former CEA chairs are, like 99% of economists in the U.S., a victim of the NC economic school that they have been trained in. They think of economics as an objective “science” and cannot accept the possibility that a fundamental change in the basic structure of the economy can lead to impacts that have not been seen in recent years, because they cannot accept the possibility of fundamental structural economic changes. The New Deal raised U.S. real GDP growth rates by over 10% in years of government spending expansion. Is 5.2% late in a second Sanders term unrealistic assuming these programs are passed?
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