Scott Adams: Economists Prefer Obama

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wanted to know which presidential candidates’ economic plan had the support of economists. Adams describes himself as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and he believes economists have a worthwhile point of view if you ask them the right questions.

A medical doctor, he points out, can’t tell you whether you are going to die of a heart attack, cancer, or an auto accident. “But if a doctor tells you to eat less and exercise more, that’s good advice even if you later get hit by a bus.” In the same way, economists can’t predict where the economy will be a year from now, but they can give good advice on economic policies such as free trade.

Since no one else was asking economists for their opinions, Adams commissioned a survey of members of the American Economic Association. He reported a summary of his results to CNN. The detailed results are available in a PowerPoint file. You can read his press release about it on his blog.

The Antiplanner remains undecided about this presidential election, so I have been eagerly waiting the results of Adams’ survey. But I have to say I am disappointed.

It turns out 48 percent of economists are Democrats, and most of them support Obama. No surprise there. Only 17 percent are Republicans and, not surprisingly, most of them support McCain. The 27 percent who are independents lean to Obama by 46 to 39 percent.

The detailed results are more subtle. Adams asked the economists which of 20 issues they felt were most important. Most said education and health care. Of the ones who said education and health care, most favored Obama.

Smaller numbers thought that international trade, taxes, and reducing waste in government were important issues. But the ones who thought those issues were important leaned toward McCain.

Perhaps it comes down to not so much economic issues but political ones. What do you think is the job of the president? What do you think the federal government can and should do, and what role does the president play in doing those things?

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On the other hand, the Constitution names the president as the “executive power” of the federal government. One of the most effective things executives can do is reduce waste in the organizations they oversee. The Constitution also explicitly gives the president power to make treaties and oversee the nation’s armed forces, so national security and international trade should be given prominence over things like education and health care.

Of course, not everyone subscribes to what the Constitution says is the role of the president or the federal government. But still, you have to ask, how effective has the federal government been on things like education and energy policy? How effective has it been encouraging technology and innovation or administering over the mortgage crisis?

The answer is that it hasn’t been effective at those things. Arguably, it has done more harm than good. So I have to wonder why economists who think those are the important issues tend to favor Obama’s policies, when Obama’s goal is to expand the role of the federal government in things like education and health care. If I truly believed education were our number one problem, I would favor policies that pushed educational decisions down to the most local level possible — which is what McCain, not Obama, supports.

Economics is supposed to be the science that studies how societies allocate scarce resources. The two most important ways of allocating resources are markets and government. (Religion is a third way, but plays a lesser role in our society.) But, as with any science, most economists tend to specialize, and most of those specialists work on the market side. Thus, they see how the market often fails.

This leads to a false conclusion. As Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize-winning economist who was prominent in the Clinton administration says, “government could potentially almost always improve upon the market’s resource allocation.”

Only recently — the past four decades or so — have some economists looked at the political side. Their finding is that, even if the market fails to always find the optimal resource allocation, government failure will be even greater. Among other things, societies that rely on government tend to be the most inequitable since the wealthy have the most political power and make sure they get the most resources. Just because there is a theoretical improvement on the market’s resource allocation doesn’t mean government will find it — it almost certainly won’t.

I suspect that the economists who support Obama are focused on market failure and relatively unfamiliar with studies of government failure. Most economists who are familiar with government failure believe that the role of government should be to make markets work better, not to act as a substitute for markets, and that is closer to McCain’s philosophy.

Of course, there are other reasons to vote for Obama, and other reasons to vote against McCain. So, for now, the Antiplanner remains on the fence.