"News Flash: Economists Agree"

Hat tip to Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan for linking to this post by Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economist and former Bush Administration Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers: "News Flash: Economists Agree". From Mankiw's post,

The recent debate over the stimulus bill has lead some observers to think that economists are hopelessly divided on issues of public policy¹. That is true regarding business cycle theory and, specifically, the virtues or defects of Keynesian economics. But it is not true more broadly.

Mankiw goes on to list fourteen propositions on which a majority of economists agree, according to various polls of the profession. The fourth one is the most relevant to the recent stimulus debate:

Fiscal policy (e.g., tax cut and/or government expenditure increase) has a significant stimulative impact on a less than fully employed economy. (90%)

Mankiw adds,

Note that the proposition about fiscal policy (#4) does not distinguish between taxes and spending as the best tool for purposes of macro stabilization. Maybe that question should be added in a future poll. I doubt, however, that the answer would make it onto this list of widely agreed upon propositions.

Tyler Cowen's New Deal 'Crib Sheet'

In his column in yesterday's New York Times, George Mason economist (and blogger) Tyler Cowen offered a 'crib sheet' of lessons from the New Deal, "Economic View: The New Deal Didn't Always Work Either". Excerpt:

As Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in a classic book, “A Monetary History of the United States,” the single biggest cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve let the money supply fall by one-third, causing deflation. Furthermore, banks were allowed to fail, causing a credit crisis. Roosevelt’s best policies were those designed to increase the money supply, get the banking system back on its feet and restore trust in financial institutions.

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (“What Ended the Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures.

The rest of the short column is worth reading. Incidentally, President-elect Obama has chosen Christina Romer to head his Council of Economic Advisers.