My Libertarian Friends Were Right

I recently joined Robinson Erhardt on his YouTube channel to talk about the overlap of politics and economics. Midway through the discussion, Erhardt asked me a good question. It’s one we often wish away, rather than confronting directly.

Do economists have a political bias?

Short answer: of course. Long answer: maybe not in the way you think.

Robinson spends a lot of time talking to economists on the left — or at least, economists who are anti-Trump. That’s a certain subsection of the field. Though the majority of economists are likely Democrats, they’re actually Democrats at a lower proportion than other academic fields. That means there’s a substantial representation of Republicans.

I worry deeply about ideological bias inflecting my analysis. So, I gave Robinson the same advice I give anyone concerned about this (and we all should be — polarization is real).

Find people you like and respect on the other side. Go to lunch with them. Try to understand how they see the world. Once you think through the issues from the perspective of someone you like and admire, you quickly stop straw-manning. Often you’ll learn another perspective. You may still disagree, but if you’re doing it right, it’s respectful disagreement.

Up until 2024, I would have told you that I’m pretty good on this score. I count Greg Mankiw — a Harvard economist who was one of George W. Bush’s economic advisors — as a dear friend and mentor. Michael Strain at the center-right American Enterprise Institute is a good mate. Jonathan Meer texts me anytime he thinks I’m wrong about something (frequently). I’ve long enjoyed agreeing and disagreeing with libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok in a conversation that has stretched over decades (and it’s no less fun — though a bit less frequent — that I tangle with his Marginal Revolution co-blogger, Tyler Cowen). I’ve learned a lot about trade from Scott Lincicome at Cato, and about fiscal issues from Jessica Reidl who was once at Heritage, but is now at Brookings. One of the great things about economics is that we have a shared language. We can talk and figure out what leads us to to see the world differently.

Except it turned out that everyone I’d been talking to seems to have ended up on the never-Trump side of the Republican fence.

When TV bookers ask me who they should bring on for a balanced perspective, I struggle. The Council of Economic Advisers used to employ the leading economists of their generation, and a number of staffers went on to win a Nobel, including Akerlof, Arrow, Bernanke, Krugman, Nordhaus, Solow, Stiglitz, and Tobin. There’s no one in the president’s inner circle who’s even going to make the long list.

I’m somewhat uncomfortable talking about politics, as I’m inherently suspicious of grand theories about how the world works. Different markets work differently, as do different folks in different times and places. I’m more comfortable with data, and trying to understand the empirical reality of a specific market in the here and now.

Even so, I have found the past decade quite instructive, and Robinson got me to share some of my personal evolution.

My libertarian-leaning friends have consistently argued against a powerful federal government in favor of individual freedoms. I had — somewhat naively — never taken their views seriously enough. My friends who worked in government were good people, I reasoned, and surely that’s true more broadly.

But I’ve had to admit to my libertarian friends that they were right. Concentration of power can be abused. We’re seeing it happen right now.

And that’s led me to become more small-c conservative. The old conservative idea was that we have rules of the game that have served us well for generations. We should be slow to change them. Our children should be handed the same set of opportunities we had, if not better ones.

The foundation of American prosperity is our institutions — the rule of law, respect for contracts, and deep engagement with the rest of the world. Markets that work, rather than favors for those in power. A democracy. A democracy means that when our leaders do a bad job, we can kick the bums out.

I don’t think that’s a deeply controversial position. But it’s the foundation of our prosperity, and it’s worth defending.

You can tune in to the full conversation above, or listen here.

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