Household name economist doesn’t know what the job of being an economist entails.

John B Taylor (inventor of the “Taylor rule”) claims the US deficit should be reduced by cutting public spending. That’s in his Project Syndicate article “Restoring Fiscal Order in the United States”.

Well the first bit of nonsense there is that it is not the job of economists to pass judgement on strictly political matters, like what proportion of GDP should be allocated to public spending, unless there are major economic consequences or implications deriving from a change to the latter proportion.  And it would seem that significant rise in the proportion of GDP allocated to public spending (as opposed to the cut in public spending advocated by Taylor) does not have major economic consequences. To illustrate, several European countries devote a much higher proportion of GDP to public spending than the US, and the “disastrous” consequences of that are what exactly? Scandinavian citizens are perfectly happy with their relatively generous social security system and enjoy standards of living much the same as Americans.

The above failure by economists to understand that it is not their job to pass judgement on political matters is actually quite common in the economics profession: John B. Taylor is far from the only one who does not seem to understand that point.

Second, what does Taylor think he is doing passing judgement on what the optimum size of the deficit and debt will be in ten or twenty years’ time? Barmy. It may be that the private sector will want to accumulate state supplied financial assets (base money and government debt) in ten years time, or it may not. If it does, and government does not supply those assets, then the private sector (and foreign government sector) will try to acquire those assets by saving rather than spending, and that will just give rise to what Keynes called “paradox of thrift unemployment”.

Again Taylor is far from the only economist who makes that mistake.
 
You really have to wonder whether some senior members of the economics profession have the faintest idea whether they are coming or going.

And finally I am always amused by the non stop attempts by Project Syndicate to get people to actually pay to read the nonsense they publish. What’s got into their head?