Flashback: Seventeen winners of the Nobel Prize in economics sign letter in support of the President’s Build Back Better package

epi.org ^ | September 20, 2021 | Joseph Stiglitz

[lowbridge]

The President’s economic agenda, the “Build Back Better” package being debated in Congress, would provide vital public investments in the nation’s physical and human infrastructure, as well as in our tattered safety net. These investments are long overdue—they were needed before the COVID-19 pandemic, and their necessity has been highlighted by the virus and the economic shock that came with it.

Some, however, have invoked fears of inflation as a reason to not undertake these investments. This view is short-sighted. These are importantly supply side measures, increasing the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, helping to improve our low employment-working age population ratio. Significantly reducing the fraction of children growing up in poverty and giving these children access to pre-K and college education will reap large dividends in years to come. We need safe school buildings and bridges, and affordable child and elder care, whether inflation is 2% or 5%. With the investments being financed by tax increases, the inflationary impacts will be at most negligible—over the medium term outweighed by the supply side benefits; and their progressivity will help address one of the country’s critical problems, the growing economic divide. 

The Build Back Better package will provide much needed support to a still-recovering economy, but it will accomplish much more than that. By meeting long-standing social needs, boosting long-term economic performance, and taking serious steps toward addressing the climate crisis we can already see unfolding, it would transform the U.S. economy to be more efficient, equitable, sustainable, and prosperous for the long run, without presenting an inflationary threat.

[Rockingham]

For those keeping score at home, here are the dopes who signed the letter:

George A. Akerlof, Professor, Georgetown University

Sir Angus Deaton, Professor, Princeton University

Peter Diamond, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Robert Engle, Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Volatility and Risk Institute, New York University

Oliver Hart, Professor, Harvard University

Daniel Kahneman, Professor, Princeton University

Eric S. Maskin, Professor, Harvard University

Daniel McFadden, Professor, University of California, Berkley

Paul Milgrom, Professor, Stanford University

Roger Myerson, Professor, University of Chicago

Edmund S. Phelps, Professor and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University

Paul Romer, Professor, New York University

William Sharpe, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

Robert Shiller, Professor, Yale University

Christopher Sims, Professor, Princeton University

Robert Solow, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joseph Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University

[oldbrowser]

Everything has been corrupted.
Politicians are liars.
Experts are frauds.
The courts are crooks
The mass media is mass misinformation.
It's like a giant game of Masquerade.

[rlmorel]

What a joke.

For what it is worth, here is the sign translation:

Looks like it is after 5 PM, time for a drink. I'll get tight, maybe touch some young girl's breasts, Jill will try to stop me, and the young girl's father will threaten to cut off my right hand. Whaddya gonna do?

[chuckee]

I wonder if Krugman is one of the 17. I would be shocked if the blithering idiot was not

[mikey_hates_everything]

Yep, overeducated, mostly Ivy League, idiots.

[Maine Mariner]

EconJack and I are both free market economists and active participants in Free Republic.

[WarANDPiece]

Joseph Stiglitz.

I remember his book “Globalization and Its Discontents,” and then he became part of the Globohomo War on Reason.

A real scumbag.

[dfwgator]

Any relation to ...

[TheBattman]

A reminder that the “Nobel Prize” has become a laughing stock of stupidity and woke ideology.

[WarANDPiece]

Lol. DAMN good movie!

Nah, he’s much worse, but in a different way!

[Jumper]

Woke awards for work people. The prize is neither Nobel nor legimate.

[31R1O]

Larry Summers is having the well deserved last laugh with this fiasco.

[31R1O]

You’ve never heard of Ludwig Von Mises or Milton Friedman? Harry Hazlitt?

[BlackbirdSST]

That’s the only reason I kept reading the comments. Hugo!

[falcon99]

“Experts” are really no longer experts.

[RckyRaCoCo]

Remove borders, destroy currencies/institute globull money system, vaccinate until compliance(servitude), until then lawfare against opposition.

Yeah, ummm....FU

[Islander7]

“… With the investments being financed by tax increases, the inflationary impacts will be at most negligible—over the medium term outweighed by the supply side benefits…”

They have no clue how contradictory that ignorant state is.

[webheart]

Paid endorsements.

[NWFree]

17 fake winners turn out to be dumb as dirt

[1Old Pro]

I think Hayek was dead on when he said, "... the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess." As long as economics maintains a positivist methodology but has incomparably - literally, incomparably - poor methods for experimentation and therefore affirmation or rejection of theories, economists are going to be wrong. Often, and badly, if history is to be trusted. I can't say it better than him so I will quote that same speech further: "This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society – as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe."

From a Quora poster