Winning the Nobel Prize in Economics Makes You Unqualified

Peter Diamond, Professor of Economics at MIT won the Nobel Prize last year for his
work on unemployment and the labor market. According to him, however "I am
unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to
the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination."

The leading opponent to Dr. Diamond's appointment was Richard Shelby,
republican from Alabama who essentially vetoed Dr. Diamond's appointment
on the basis of the fact that Dr. Diamond's work had no relevance, and that the
the Nobel laureate had no experience in "crisis management."

According to Dr. Diamond, "we should all worry about how distorted the confirmation
process has become, and how little understanding of monetary policy there is among
some of those responsible for its Congressional oversight. We need to preserve the
independence of the Fed from efforts to politicize monetary policy and to limit the Fed’s
ability to regulate financial firms."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/opinion/06diamond.html

I would love to know what Richard Shelby's background in economics is like for him to be in
he position to judge the work of prospective appointees like Dr. Diamond. A recent case that
had a similar ring was the vetting process around Goodwin Liu who ended up withdrawing his
nomination to an appeals judgeship after Republicans oppossed his appointment. Liu is
Associate Dean and Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) one of the
country's most prestigious law schools.

So what we have now is that ignorant yokels and big mouths more qualified to run the
country than highly educated people with real expertise?

When you're dealing in a fact-free environment (as Karl Rove called his party's positions in 2004) and work with truthiness, actual experts are a threat. So you have to denigrate, debase, and demean the whole concept of expertise. So the Republicans use the most awesome privately owned propaganda machine the world has ever known to render, for many people, expertise an automatic disqualification. One can see this in every field in which there are actual facts, e.g. economics, evolutionary biology, climatology, etc.

It's anti-intellectualism for the 21st century.

The GOP knows that the best way to get these sheep to follow them is not with facts, but with a new religion, a new theology, one that requires no facts. Then you teach them that these "experts" are outside the faith and not to be trusted.

Many years ago I was an economist. The problem with macroeconomics is that it is untestable. You cannot wall off part of the economy and inflate money supply to that part and see if that works. Or vice versa.

Nobody has solved the knowledge problem. And it cannot be solved. Yet the federal reserve must be run. How do we do that? IMHO, not doing anything drastic is probably the best thing to do. Announce the changes to monetary policy well ahead of time. Allow people some certainty in their affairs. (Tax policy should be the same but we keep having these damn elections...)

As in all aspects of life the problem is not what we know but that we think we know a lot more than we actually do.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he's got the armed forces killing people in three major conflicts. Nobel Prizes aren't exactly what they're hyped up to be.

are not the same thing. I'm going to ignore the rest of your comment, even though it is strife with inaccuracies with regards to timing and prevalent culture at the time.

If you think economics is like physics or chemistry, you are quite mistaken. Economics is more like an art that uses some math.

If you are going to say there are inaccuracies in my previous post, it is only polite - not to me, but to others who may read this exchange - to state what you believe they are. It's a pretty short and factual post so I'm quite curious how a couple of sentences with plain, easily verifiable facts in them qualifies as "strife with inaccuracies".

I know what Economics is, thank you very much. My post did not say it was a science, it did not say 'Economics and other sciences', it said 'Economics and sciences'. Econ is a social science, which everyone knows are very fuzzy to deal with.

Now on to your inaccuracies:

Obama won the Peace Prize after he declared a major shift in US policy towards the existing wars. Were there 3 wars when he won it? No. Had he been in charge of these wars for any length of time when he won it? No.

You make it sound as if he won the award *after* the continuation of these wars and after committing air support in Libya which is grossly inaccurate and only shows you have an axe to grind. Of course, with your Crystal Ball(tm), you as the magnificent one would not have given it to him because of the future you already apparently knew.

the Obama prize demonstrates that they are not handed out for accomplishments, since he had accomplished nothing at the time he was nominated, and still had accomplished nothing at the time he was awarded the prize.

I do have an axe to grind - it's called being anti-war. And I had every reasonable expectation based on his past statements and later acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize that Obama would be a Peace President. I won't get fooled again, not by him and not by the Nobel committee.

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For the GOP Senators, this Economist was chosen by a Democratic politician, and that alone is enough reason to block the appointment.

The GOP does not want bipartisanship, they want a take-no-prisoners battle to the death. You cannot reason with the irrational hive mind.

nations as long as we have these GOP terrorists holding the taxpayers hostage.