What Can an Economic Adviser Do When He Disagrees with the President?

Date Published:

Abstract:

Assuming he is confirmed by the Senate, Greg Mankiw, a leading Harvard economics professor, will soon be the new Chairman of President Bush?s Council of Economic Advisers. The president should be congratulated for such an outstanding choice.

Mankiw may need some advice, however — a historical perspective, in particular, on what an adviser can do when official White House policy goes contrary to his convictions as a professional economist. Of course, it would be a remarkable coincidence if any president accepted every position that his economic advisers had taken on every issue. But there are likely to be especially large divergences between this president and good economics as represented, for example, by Mankiw?s own very popular textbook. This is why I am concerned. I am thinking of such issues as budget deficits, steel tariffs, agricultural subsidies, and conflict with the Fed.

He will be joining an NEC director and Treasury secretary who have already been asked to sell a shift toward budget deficits that appears inconsistent with their past views. But it is possible for a Treasury Secretary or an Assistant to the President to toe the party line while in office, and then confess later that this did not entirely correspond to his true beliefs. (On the subject of budget deficits, see the memoirs of David Stockman and Richard Darman, for example, who were, respectively, Budget Director and Assistant to the President in the first Reagan Administration.) A professor of economics like Mankiw, who plans to return to Harvard after his service as a White House advisor, cannot engage in such inconsistencies, without risking losing some of the professional credibility that is so important to an academic career. Indeed, this truth–telling constraint may be the most valuable advantage of having a Council of Economic Advisers, and may explain why Congress legislated the institution in the first place. Encumbered by academic reputations, they are unencumbered by long–term political careers.

It might help to know the variety of strategies tried by past economic advisers, when they have found themselves disagreeing with the president. The history may be especially instructive in that often the disagreements have been over some of the same issues likely to come up in the current administration.

Notes: