Do Democrats Have a Technocrat Problem?

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/opinion/democrats-republican-objectivity.html

No paywall
https://archive.fo/t7NUU

More than a decade ago, the commentator Jonathan Chait wrote about the “hack gap,” a striking difference between the behavior of Republican and Democratic experts (or in some cases, “experts”) when their party controls the government. Republican experts slavishly praise their leaders, no matter what they do; Democratic experts strive for objectivity and, if anything, bend over backward to criticize their own side.

This happens in many areas; Chait was talking about legal analysis, but I see it all the time in my home field.

During the Trump years, Republican economists, even those you might have expected to be concerned about their professional reputations, rushed to embrace extravagant and implausible claims about what Donald Trump’s tax cuts would achieve. Some were even willing to abase themselves in ways reminiscent of Putin cronies. Remember when Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago declared that Trump had economic instincts “on par with many Nobel economists I have worked with”?

Democratic economists, by contrast, often seem eager to display their independence by criticizing Biden administration policies. And while intellectual integrity is a good thing, I’d argue that sometimes the desire to seem independent leads Democratic economists to overdo it — to criticize arguments or policy proposals that actually make sense, perhaps especially if these proposals would be politically popular.

Let me give you two examples, one minor and one much bigger.

The minor example is proposals for a temporary cut in gasoline taxes to reduce inflationary pressures. There are some good arguments against doing this; in the long run we want to discourage people from burning fossil fuels, not make them cheaper. But I’ve been astonished to encounter Democratic-leaning economists and economics writers asserting that a gas-tax cut wouldn’t help consumers and that it would simply increase oil company profits.

*snip*

[Budi]

1. Democrats aren't a cult.

Not the true ones, anyway.

It's not a difficult answer.

[NewHendoLib]

2. Democrats actually like to use their brain, do analysis, have true opinions

[msongs]

3. one suspects the price surge of oil/gas is arbitrary, not related to costs of production. In other

words the price of gas is determined the level of gouging demanded by the producers

[Midnight Writer]

4. Exactly. Take away the gas tax and the oil industry will not cut prices, just increase profits.