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             Conversations About Richard Posner And the People He Fights With                

Not being very tech savvy, this was the best I could do in terms of remaking our banner and motto to reflect current events here at the Faculty Lounge.  It seems that we’ve been covering a lot of Richard Posner scrapes lately.  First there was the back and forth with Thaler (here and here).  Then there was the David Levi tiff (here). 

But this one promises to be much better.  In his August 18 blog post for The Atlantic, Honesty about the Stimulus, Posner criticizes the August 6 talk by Christina Romer, chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, entitled "So, Is It Working? An Assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at the Five-Month Mark."  She is referring, of course, to the economic stimulus package, and her answer is “absolutely.”

Posner, however, does “not think her analysis is responsible,” and is “concerned with the fact that academic economists, when they become either public officials or public intellectuals (like Paul Krugman), leave behind their academic scruples.”  Posner picks through Romer’s arguments in some detail, so you should read his post (and her report, linked above) in its entirety to fully understand the substance of the dispute.  Posner concludes by questioning the ethical responsibility of economists who write for the media or join the government:

This raises the question of the ethical responsibility of academic economists, such as Romer (and Krugman, and Lawrence Summers, and many others), who write for the media or join the government, either to adhere to academic standards in their nonacademic work or to make clear to the public that they are on holiday from those standards and that what they say in their public-intellectual or governmental careers should not be thought identical to their academic views.

Mark Thoma (here) and Brad DeLong (here) are not pleased, and quickly enter the fray in defense of Romer. In Unidentified Pretend Economist, Thoma asserts that Posner is wrong on many points:

Yet, nowhere does he say “I don’t know what I am talking about because I am a judge, not a macroeconomist.” Instead, in his role as a public intellectual, he acts like he is an expert in the field. Ethics indeed.

DeLong launches a more extended critique.  In Richard A. Posner's Ethical Lapses, he argues that Posner writes dishonestly about the stimulus package, and that Posner’s piece contained at least seven major ethical lapses.  According to DeLong:

In my view, anyone holding themself out as a public intellectual has one duty: to be smart. Being smart involves (a) checking your arithmetic, (b) building up your intellectual tools, (c) using Google, (d) reading works until you understand them, and (e) not writing things where you have absolutely no clue about what you are talking about.

Does Richard Posner think that he is behaving ethically here? In my view, he has failed to satisfactporily [sic] perform any item of that checklist.

Yesterday, Posner responded to DeLong, again on the Atlantic blog, in Christina Romer Defended by an Angry Academic Colleague, dismissing the bulk of DeLong’s claims and arguing that the piece reinforced his distrust of macroeconomists' analysis of the economic crisis.  That’s all for now, but you know where to get the blow-by-blow if (when?) Judge Posner starts arguing with someone else.  

Comments

[Frank]

I suppose at some point a critical mass of Posner-critique will build. Some of my favorites include:

Eskridge, The Economics Epidemic in an AIDS Perspective, in The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Spring, 1994),

Ian Shapiro, Richard Posner’s Praxis, a chapter in Shapiro’s book The flight from reality in the human sciences.

Most of the commentaries on his Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (I think published in the Harvard L. Rev., along with the lecture that later became the book).

Jeanne L. Schroeder, Just So Stories: Posnerian Economic Methodology, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=229874.

And the reflections here on whether his book Public Intellectuals is “worthy of being dismissed or being considered an elaborate joke:”
http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue2/posner.htm

[Kim Krawiec]

Thanks Frank. I had not seen the "review of the reviews" on Public Intellectuals, which I just briefly read through. My read is that it's more critical of the reviewers than of Posner. Did you have a different sense?