Hubbard: “his academic writing stands on its own”
That is how this piece puts the argument that Glenn Hubbard, Romney’s go-to economist, hasn’t been improperly influenced by hedge funds that have paid him in lavish sums: he truly believes in the policies (e.g., cuts to capital gains and income taxes) that he’s helped both Bush and Romney advance, even if, yes, it turns out that he’s also been well remunerated.
For this he was portrayed as personally corrupt in the award-winning documentary “Inside Job,” and he can easily be seen as a major cog in the machinery of what I call Asshole Capitalism, a system in which assholes, especially elite assholes, plunder public life out of a sense that ever-more is their entitlement. What to say here? Here’s my guess. The documentary was pretty unfair (I felt bad for Hubbard, since the interview seemed to be agreed to on false pretenses). Hubbard probably isn’t a major asshole himself. And yet, he probably is that cog in the machine.
I can’t tell whether Hubbard is personally an asshole, or even corrupt by prevailing standards among economists. Economists are, after all, strongly encouraged to advice both politicians and firms. (Maybe Hubbard’s reported management style at Columbia University is more telling?)
Does he sincerely hold his views? I’m sure he does. But you can sincerely hold views in part because you have powerful personal incentives to hold them, which lead you to give weight to evidence that confirms them while ignoring or deemphasizing plausible opposing perspectives. This is especially easy when this fits with “conventional wisdom” of the day or week among the presumed best and brightest or one’s intellectual soul mates If we probably all do that to some extent, many of us do it with gusto. In that way, so I’m thinking, Hubbard (along with many left-leaning economists, such as Democrat Larry Summers) are a key part of the Asshole Capitalist problem in the U.S. The bigger problem, if that is right, is not those economists per se but what has become of the economics profession (at least in an older generation, which is now, thankfully, giving way to younger, more empirically-minded, and less ideological crop).
The critique of the economics profession is by now pretty familiar. (Though I might add that, in my own research on the global economy, I’ve been amazed at how much economists knowingly over-simplify the case for free trade in order to influence policy with blatantly political ambitions under cover of social science. Harvard trade economist Dani Rodrik nicely explains the oversimplification here.) Hubbard points up a different idea: that largely well-meaning people who aren’t assholes per se–people who aren’t or at least weren’t personally entrenched in a sense of entitlement–are nevertheless drawn into a culture that causes the proliferation of asshole-like conduct and a set of *convictions* that rationalize it–a culture, if you will, of assholery.
I don’t say this simply because I’m coming from the left (though I’m sure that is part of it). My main grounds are pretty modest: there is just very little actual economic evidence for the views Hubbard vigorously advocates. Like many economists of a certain stripe, he holds a *philosophical* position, with at best inconclusive science behind it, that massively exaggerates the motivating power of tax cuts, especially when tax rates are already relatively low. There could in theory be a sound philosophical basis for this, but the standard argument, that we all are or should be rationally self-interested optimizers, is shaky at best. Philosophers have said so for a long time, and behavioral psychology has finally, at long last, ruined that outlook as something more than a philosophical view. That doesn’t seem to matter for Hubbard. And since economic evidence doesn’t seem to be necessary either, it just looks as though politics, ambition, and privilege in a supportive elite culture is driving the arguments.
