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Looking further afield...
August 14, 2012 | 08:17 AM
Firstly, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed both Mr Card's article and (most of) the commentary from others (whatever their viewpoint).
I especially enjoyed Ben's point about how we can't know what might have been had it not been Obama and co calling the shots - it might have been loads better, or loads worse - we just don't know. (Which, logically, also emphasises how ludicrous it is to apportion blame or credit, except, perhaps, in response to the starkest blunders or most self-evidently good decisions - since we can never know what would have happened had decision A, B or C not been taken, how can we possibly say that decision A, B or C led to outcome X, Y or Z?)
As to the title of my post, I'm from the UK, and our economy is similarly failing to recover - is this because our current Government is making bad decisions, or would things be much worse than they are if those decisions had not been taken? Who knows? Who CAN know?! Perhaps the only vaguely useful indicator is how one's national economy is shaping up against other comparable national economies - but of course "comparable" is (necessarily) such a loose term, and I'm not sure there even IS a national economy that is comparable to that of the US. (No, not China's, for various reasons too involved to go into here.)
So where does this leave us? I claim no expert knowledge, but it seems to me that, even if we buy the premise that the laws of economics are few and simple, the systems in which they operate are (as Mr. Card acknowledges) incredibly complex - and who can REALLY predict whether Policy A will have a better or worse net effect on the economy than Policy B (even leaving aside the fact that terms like "better" and "worse" are themselves highly qualitative and open to subjective interpretation)?
So, yes, every voter should probably take steps to inform themselves on economic issues and the underlying principles, even if only to promote independent thought, but ultimately the sheer unknowability surrounding the impact of economic policy surely means that who we choose to elect comes down to two main things:
- sheer gut instinct (like Ben's "Personally, I think it's worth a shot to find out if Romney can do better."); and
- how we feel about the candidates' wider ideologies.
Neither of which has much to do with the laws of economics, interesting though they may be.
Al
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