What Economists WantMike Rappaport

Greg Mankiw lists 8 reforms that he believes economists support.  I agree with virtually all of them.  (Mankiw argues that we should tax the use of energy, which I would support only if other taxes were reduced on a dollar for dollar basis.)

Here is one that might be a little surprising: "A 2006 poll of professional economists asked whether the United States should legalize marijuana. Those in favor outnumbered those opposed more than three to one."

Comments

[dearieme]

"Mankiw argues that we should tax the use of energy": yeah, starting about 1973.

[Bob Hawkins]

Some years ago, when David Warsh was the economics columnist for the Boston Globe, he wrote a column on the same theme. His angle was that the idea that economists agree on nothing is an artifact. He listed some things that 95% of economists agree with, like free economies outperform centrally planned economies, rent control is counterproductive, etc.

He said that the problem is, all the things on which economists agree are things which liberals, including most reporters, don't want to be true. So they don't report that economists agree on them. Hence people think that economists don't agree on anything.

Warsh is a mainline liberal, as you would expect since he was a Globe columnist not named Jeff Jacoby. But he actually knows something about his subject, which caused him to occasionally write something just because it's true. When the New York Times bought the Globe, he was sent packing. He now has a blog:

http://www.economicprincipals.com/

[Eric Rasmusen]

Mankiw's list is generally good. He may even be right about economists' professional viewpoint making them support marijuana legalization, but don't forget that we economists are PhD's too, and hence mostly liberals. Thus, whenever our views *do* coincide with liberal views, there is an identification problem of determining whether it is our knowledge of free markets or our liberalism (I speak, of course, for my group, not myself).

I'd be a little suspicious on energy taxation being too low also. It has negative externalities, but it is so heavily taxed and regulated that I would not be surprised if we've overcompensttaed already. Someone told me there was an Amerifcan Ec. Review aritcle on the subject a year or two ago.