40 sats \ 32 replies \ @Undisciplined 2 Jul \ parent \ on: Robert Reich’s Blind Spots: The Elephant in the Progressive Left’s Room econ
Even his CV doesn't list what his areas of study were, so it's not as easy as you'd think. Generally speaking, an economist has a PhD in Economics, which he does not.
No economic credentials
Not necessarily a dealbreaker. David Friedman taught law and economics at Santa Clara University for 25 years and all his degrees are in physics
BA history
MA philosophy politics economics
JD
He is a lawyer by training
He was appointed as secretary of labor by Bill Clinton because they were friends from law school and the labor department requires someone who has a legal background and some experience with labor law and antitrust laws and National Labor Relations Board etc
He has taught public policy but no economics courses
As labour secretary he clashed with Greenspan about the budget and spending and deficits
He has criticised the Fed for exacerbating inequality and focusing too much on inflation at the expense of “full” employment.
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Friedman is a good example of someone with no economics credentials, who nonetheless is an economist. He thinks like an economist and he has been employed as an economist.
Anyone who advocates Fed printing to curb unemployment has most likely not made the connection between inflation and inequality, which is the criticism we were talking about at the beginning.
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Where was my original point about inflation and inequality?
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The original post is about how progressives, like Reich, don't understand that the Fed creates inequality when it inflates the money supply.
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Right. And I disagreed with Reich being lumped in with the others and your response was he is not an economist.
Am I missing something?
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He lumps the labor economist in with politicians
That's why I noted that he is not an economist.
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Ah, disagree. I know PhDs in Physics and Chemistry who are advanced engineers and confer PHDs in Biomedical Engineering. They'll yell you they are both. One says I'm educated in Physics, but work as an engineer.
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That's fine. I wasn't expecting this to turn into a debate about the meaning of "economist".
I am a labor economist and I don't think of him as one of us, because he wasn't trained in labor economics and he doesn't work as a labor economist. I can appreciate that these fine distinctions that are drawn within a field may not be shared by those outside the field.
You’re missing everything
Reich should be lumped with the communists and progressives.
He is not an economist. You challenged us to verify and we did
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I can't tell which side you arguing half the time. Sometimes both.
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His parents and uncle all had PhD in economics from U Chicago
Milton Friedman
Rose
Aaron Director
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I am appalled by the economic illiteracy encountered in leading newspapers, business magazines, and prominent web sites (the news section of the Wall Street Journal is no exception). Robert Reich’s Higher Wages Can Save America’s Economy – and Its Democracy (Salon.com) is only one of many examples. As a teacher of economics for over forty years and a co-author of a best-selling 1980s economics 101 textbook, I would have given Reich’s paper a resounding F, if he had submitted it for my elementary economics class.
Reich’s elevated credentials point to an automatic A+. As a frequent TV pundit, author of 13 books, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley no less, and self-identified as “one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy,” many readers will automatically believe his economic nonsense. As a former Secretary of Labor, readers would be surprised to learn that Reich does not appear to understand how wages and labor markets work.
Reich’s resume raises one red flag: He is not an economist but a lawyer – a Yale Law School classmate of Hillary Clinton, who studied a smattering of economics for his PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) degree at Oxford – a Rhodes Scholar no less. I am no formal credentials snob. Non PhD economists, such as Robert Samuelson, write very good economics. Robert Reich is not one of them.
My F grade is also not based on Reich’s politics, which are quite different from my own. I award it instead for Reich’s incorrect facts and his embarrassing misunderstanding of basic issues about which economists agree.
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If you have his cv you see a very long list of peer reviews publications of research in economics and public policy. But if you need a PhD in econ to satisfy you, you are right then.
I thought the work one does determined the profession, but I'm funny that way.
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I didn't have his CV at the outset. I had heard that he wasn't trained in economics, which is all my point was.
It's not about satisfying me. There are plenty of PhD Economists who stink at economics, too. There are also plenty of people with no formal training who think about economics really clearly.
Professional training shapes how people approach problems and from what I've seen Reich doesn't really think like an economist. I'd describe him as a political scientist who works on economic topics.
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You can't research public policy without economics. It is the foundation.
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You absolutely can and many do. These are distinct fields with distinct methodologies.
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Public Policy incorporates Econ. Duke lists it first when describing their program.
Duke’s PhD in Public Policy is distinguished by its truly interdisciplinary nature. The program offers a unique balance of depth in a discipline such as:
economics
political science
psychology
sociology
Most "top" unis are very similar.
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And economics incorporates mathematics and political science, but I don't consider myself to be either a mathematician or a political scientist.
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But you are projecting your situation onto others. Using your example, I know many mathematicians who are software engineers. But I guess you can deny it. It is still true.
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I'm saying that "incorporating" economics into a program does not make those who finish it economists.
He's not a trained economist and he's not a professional economist. I'm not sure in what sense I'm supposed to think that he is an economist.
He seems like a political scientist or public policy expert who specializes on labor. That's a similar profession to labor economist, but it isn't the same thing.
Powell doesn’t have a PhD in economics
Bill O’Reilly called Reich a communist. Then he interviewed him on the Factor and the interview was cordial. No shouting or mudslinging
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