| Here's a chart of all the economists who appeared during this period, with the number of times they appeared, a running total of appearances, and a running total of the percentage of appearances by "economists":
And, by way of comparison, here's a chart of all those who appeared at least three times. There are just two economists on this second chart, both from the Obama Administration:
Almost 1/10th of all appearances (9.8%) came from just 4 guests--three in-house CNN personalities, and GOP Chair Michael "Bling-Bling" Steele, who appears to know less about economics than every child in America who gets an allowance.
Almost 1/5th of all appearances (18.5%) came from the 12 guests who racked up 5 or more appearances. And the next six guests--with 4 appearances each--brought the total close to 1/4th (23.7%). Another 23 guests, with 3 appearances each, added another 15% for just under 2/5th of all guests (38.7%).
This is truly a highly concentrated list of influentials on cable TV, and only two of them--Peter Orszag and Larry Summers--are economists.
Such a makeup could be defensible, one supposes, if:
(1) The principles of economics involved were well understood by all involved, including the public (or, alternatively, those principles were explained to the public in the course of these discussions).
(2) The political debates were all delimited by the conventional economic consensus (a realistic historical understanding of past recessions and depressions, general agreement on the relative effectiveness of different sorts of stimulus measures, etc.)
(3) The nutcases like Amity Shlaes were eliminated.
This is, however, clearly not the case. The above list of guests discussing the stimulus package are clearly incompetent to understand it's potential realworld impacts, and without that, any semblance of an informative discussion is clearly impossible.
In short, what we are seeing here is a discussion by elite minions who are on their face incompetent for the job they are involved in doing. While it is certainly a welcome step forward to be rid of the rank incompetents who ran the Bush Administration for the part 8 years, this sampling of those who dominated the televised discussion of the stimulus package makes it blindingly obvious that our public policy discourse remains dominated by people who simply are not qualified to understand what they are talking about.
This is madness.
The notion that bloggers are somehow inferior to the mainstream media is a thesis that's very difficult to maintain in the face of this sort of evidence to the contrary. |
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