Quote:
Originally Posted by saden1
It's going to be tough to read all of that...can you summarize and name the economists please? Thanks.
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No worries. 12th asked for one, so I thought I'd give him a few to pick from.
Kling - quick bio
Arnold Kling's personal web page
Kling argues that the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis disrupted what had been "a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade" and that we need to let the market economy develop a new one.
Instead, the policies of the Obama Democrats have been aimed at propping up the old order -- holding up housing prices and the mortgage market, keeping the Detroit auto companies in place, maintaining the lush standard of living of public employee union members (the purpose of the $26 billion the House was summoned back to Washington to approve Tuesday).
Maintaining unsustainable patterns of production, Kling writes, prevents the trial-and-error process of private investment that creates new jobs and patterns of production that will be sustainable.
Marc De Vos - quick bio
Marc De Vos index
Across the Atlantic, Marc De Vos, director of the Itinera Institute, a Brussels think tank, advances similar arguments in his book "After the Meltdown." The financial crisis, he argues, has brought a revival of "state capitalism," in which governments "have an increased and distorting role in economics."
"The state should be the partner of the market, not the owner or manipulator of the market," he writes. "Governments should not pick economic winners and losers. The state may be back, but the politicians should be modest."
Meltzer's is a good read, from my perspective
Eugene Fama - wiki bio
Eugene Fama - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What has Fama learned from the crisis, then? “I learned a lot about government overreactions but not much about recessions,” he tells me. Confronted with a sharp economic downturn, governments face political pressure to act; stimulus spending and other state interventions seem sensible, even when the history of past crises suggests otherwise. Worse, the new public debt and regulations then hobble economic recovery. Rebounding from the post-2007 recession would have been quicker, Fama believes, if the government had mostly let free markets clean up the mess, reestablish true prices, and select the enterprises able to survive.
Sachs - quick bio
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Director - The Earth Institute, Columbia University
He's a lefty and Keynesian proponent who thinks Obama essentially hasn't gone far enough.
"Little bits of these efforts are strewn through the stimulus legislation, the pending climate legislation and elsewhere. But the administration has not done the hard work to bring these complex initiatives to reality. Intercity rail does not just appear by itself. Direct-voltage transmission lines require a new federal and regional power grid strategy. Nuclear power requires presidential leadership to get moving again. Carbon-capture and storage requires a partnership of science and industry, backed in early stages by public technology funds.
The president has lost the economic initiative, weighed down by a tedious fight between two outmoded ideologies: Keynesianism and supply-side tax cuts, as well as by the president’s excessive deference to Congress.
The president occasionally sings these lyrics but has not yet presented a plan. Move now, Mr President, or we will spend our time digging out of the next consumer bust and buying our technology from China."
If you only read two, read the Meltzer and the Job Creation link from Hennesey. Most of the rest is pretty much just piling on.