Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Unfalsifiable achievements

Posted on | June 12, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a “non-measurable metric.”…Now, something’s wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It’s true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn’t tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

And this is coming from an administration that took great care to recruit distinguished academic economists and scientists. As the author of the piece points out, the remarkable thing is not so much that politicians try to make claims that cannot be falsified, but that few people call them out on such nonsense. Where is Karl Popper when we need him?

Category: Economics, Politics
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