After Obama advisor and Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee made the news for his off-the-cuff, disputed, but quite plausible comments to a Canadian diplomat, Josh Wright over at Truth on the Market asks:

how important are economic advisers anyway? ... As a general matter, I think it is perfectly appropriate to give credit to the principal for the quality of the agents he or she is able to attract....[but] I’m significantly discounting the possibility that Goolsbee is exhibiting much of a constraining effect on Obama or that his presence should be relevant to the free trade credentials of the candidates.

Matthew Yglesias, btw, thinks that Goolsbeegate is ending up being very important, though he's focused on the politics, not on the advice.  I think that economics advisors, like most advisors, make little picture, rather than big picture differences, and mostly only after the election, when they're appointed to a job where they can make some substantive decisions that higher ups are too busy to review.  Economics advisors are, in short, mid-level bureaucrats - and it can be nice to be a mid-level bureaucrat, but it's not like you get to steer the country towards anarcho-syndicalism or anything.

At any rate, it's a good time to point you to Goolsbee's recent commencement address, where he genially tries to define the nature of economic inquiry:

We really don’t deal with the loftiest ideals of humanity. We deal with humans at their most mundane. We aren’t about narratives and inspiration or how people would behave in their finest hours. We are about how people behave in the everyday marketplace. I think we are especially hated because of the nagging fear on the part of idealists that we might be right about people. Our world view begins with a few of the following points:  First, economists typically ignore what people say and only look at what they do....Economists are perfectly comfortable in a world of choosing between the lesser of evils. In our world, everything is an evil. Nothing is perfect....Next, economists don’t take anecdotes for answers....We spend lots of time thinking about causality and indirect effects...

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