Econocrats

If you look in any joke book, the number of lawyer jokes is rivaled only by the number of economist jokes. That’s understandable enough, given that the clean, numerical science of economics has been defiled by the bottom-feeders of the profession, the econocrats, who are usually government-funded faithhealers in the business of selling schlock.

In fact, show me a slovenly, third-rate economy, and I’ll show you a bunch of toady econocrats who are nothing but puffed up bureaucrats sucking at the government trough. Which isn’t to say that all government economists or central bankers are lousy, of course; the U.S. Federal Reserve has many top notch economists, and I studied under government economists from South Korea and Italy who were superlative professionals.

Still, most of the world lives in the age of bureaucracy, and the econocrats have become the public’s image of what economics is all about. Sad, but true. When I first arrived on Saipan years ago, someone once asked me if I’m a “conservative or liberal economist.” This bellwether comment shows that people can’t separate economics from politics, or economics from pop-psychology. The econocrats have only served to validate this misconception.

In contrast to the social agenda pushed by econocrats, the pure science of economics does not deign to catagorize human behavior, or economic outcomes, as “good” or “bad.” Economics, the real kind, seeks to measure and forecast levels of output and consumption, or changes to those levels, which is why it’s mostly a bunch of differential calculus, since differential calculus is concerned with measuring rates of change. That’s pretty much the entire deal in economics; I’d say fully 90 percent.

But people are emotional, not quantitative, creatures, and econocrats have a keen sense of selling pop-psychology instead of the real deal. You can see the results on Saipan, of course, as you can around much of the world. As the mathematician Bertrand Russell famously quipped, “Most people would rather die than think.”

Not all of the world has fallen into this trap, though. For example, Austria and Switzerland regularly produce some excellent economists, and I can only conclude that Austria and Switzerland have substantial segments of the population that are capable of employing reasoning instead of emotion.

Worldwide, however, logic is never a popular sell, though rationality and the laws of cause and effect still won’t go away. Indeed, you may not like the free market (the econocrats hate it) but free market forces are as predictable and immutable as the laws of thermodynamics.

But even there, I offer no emotional stake in the concept. I’m no crusader for the free market, and, in fact, I readily admit that most societies would rather have authority than freedom, and therefore prefer socialism to free enterprise. Why should I care about that? When studying a given economy, I merely factor its preferences into my calculations, but I don’t personally care if people would prefer to live in poverty, starvation, or servitude instead of wealth, abundance, and freedom. The bottom line is, and always will be, that only a tiny percentage of the planet can really handle the responsibilities that come along with freedom. People get the governments they deserve, and they get the economies they deserve. Period. It’s amusing, so I don’t know why so many sour-faced people take it all so seriously.

Which makes the econocrats, anywhere you go, just another breed of clowns in the human circus of bloated bureaucracies and goofy economies. I love a good chuckle as the econocrats sell the same snake oil year after year to the same gullible mobs and dim-witted committees. If you can’t laugh at those antics, you’re taking things too seriously, and it’s time to reach for a good joke book.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)