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BUSINESSMEN MAKE BAD ECONOMISTS

You heard it here second.  From a businessman.  Paul Krugman said it first regarding Mitt Romney:

“A brief thought on something I’ll try to expand on later. Leaving aside all the questions about what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do at Bain — and about hisself-aggrandizing double standard — there’s an even broader question: why does anyone believe that success in business qualified someone to make economic policy?

For the fact is that running a business is nothing at all like making macro policy. The key point about macroeconomics is the pervasiveness of feedback loops due to the fact that workers are also consumers. No business sells a large fraction of its output to its own workers; even very small countries sell around two-thirds of their output to themselves, because that much is non-tradable services.”

Unfortunately, economists have turned out to be pretty bad economists also over the last 50 years.  So, that sticks us with no businessmen and no economists, which naturally leaves us with….businesswomen?

 

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