MAGA's Overreaching Anti-Economists Get It All Wrong

2025-06-02 05:05:00

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Oren Cass , the founder of the think tank American Compass, is probably the leading intellectual voice of MAGA economics. In a recent blog post , he discusses the question of whether economic forces are like gravity. He writes:

Oh, really? Would such a man be a moron? Then please explain to me how Edmond Halley, using only his knowledge of gravity, and having no understanding of any of the other forces of nature, was able to predict a solar eclipse in 1715 to an accuracy of four minutes:

Cass - who holds a Bachelor's in political economy from Williams College and a law degree from Harvard, but has no apparent training in physics - confidently assures us that anyone who attempted what Edmond Halley did would be“something of a moron.”

This is the kind of insult that says less about the target than about the person doing the insulting. Before you make confident assertions about a field of study, you owe it to your readers to attempt to understand that field at least a little bit.

A botched physics analogy is harmless enough. But Cass' main argument isn't about gravity at all - it's about economics. And it's here where his willingness to make grand pronouncements about whole fields of study gets him into real trouble.

Cass' post is a response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Matthew Hennessey. Hennessey, in turn, is responding to J.D. Vance's declaration that markets are a“tool.” Hennessey argues that markets are more like a force of nature than a tool.1 Cass is trying to rebut Hennessey, criticizing market fundamentalism while also taking a swipe at the entire discipline of economics.

Now, I am no fan of market fundamentalism, and I spent my early years as a blogger bashing the field of (macro)economics - often with even more scorn than Oren Cass employs in this post. But I like to think that when I did this , I generally stuck to making specific criticisms about actual economic models and methods.

A lot of econ critics don't do this. Back when I was at Bloomberg, I used to have fun poking at the grandiose broadsides against economics that periodically appear in British publications like The Guardian or The Telegraph .

These critiques tend to repeat the same old nostrums over and over - economics isn't a science, it doesn't do controlled experiments, its assumptions are bad, its theories don't work, people can't be predicted like particles, etc. etc.

There are grains of truth to these boilerplate critiques, but the people who write them generally haven't bothered to pay much attention to what modern economists actually do. Here's what I wrote in a Bloomberg post back in 2017:

Yes, studying mass human behavior is different than studying the motions of the planets, in a number of important ways. But the intellectuals who loftily declare that economics“isn't a science” don't seem like they've bothered to think very hard about what those differences are, or when and why they matter.

For example, what do the people who write that“economics isn't a science” think about natural experiments - the empirical technique that has taken over much of econ research in the last three decades? Do they think that these are always less informative than lab experiments in the natural sciences?

And if so, why? What do they think are the strengths and weaknesses of natural experiments relative to lab experiments, and how much can they help us test theories and derive general principles about how economies work?

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