For Americans living through the recent months of crisis, some of the latest economic data may come as a surprise. Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.) over the past six months remained far above what we could have achieved even a decade ago. Investors have driven key stock indexes back above their February peaks. But rarely have such economic indicators been so entirely beside the point. Seriously: Who cares?
What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?
Typically shielded from such problems, the country’s professional class now finds itself experiencing a taste of the insecurity and anxiety that the working class has felt for decades: The dissolution of community; the suddenly prohibitive distances separating friends and family; the anger at experts selling ineffective, poorly planned schooling as adequate to their children’s needs.
Recommended Reading
Why the Economists Are Losing
The basic quandary for economists in this debate is that they stake their claims to expertise and deference on their field’s purported rigor, but they can uphold their own standards only under artificial conditions inapplicable to policymaking. As a result, their work’s defensibility bears an inverse relationship to its relevance.
Why the Free Trade Debate Needs the Real Adam Smith
Oren Cass is right to note that modern economists largely misunderstand Adam Smith. But the misunderstanding runs deeper and traces even further back than editorializing in 20th-century textbooks. For more than two centuries, scholars have ignored the relationship between Smith’s political philosophy and economic analysis.
It’s Time for a Neoclassical Economic Reckoning
Oren Cass’s essay demonstrates how the advantages of industrial policy, apparent to some of the founders of economics and foundational to the success of the United States, were carefully airbrushed out by advocates of free trade in the 20th century.
