Robert Barro, Libertarian

The International Monetary Fund's Prakash Loungani has written an interesting intellectual profile of economist Robert Barro, a perennial short-lister for a Nobel Prize whose work is as influential as it is ignored by governments. A snippet:

Barro's libertarian beliefs perhaps also explain in part why, unlike many other famous macroeconomists, he has not been a prominent policy advisor to the U.S. or other governments. It's difficult to "be popular with governments" when advocating that many of their functions ought to fade away, he says. In any event, he has not been very influential in his rare forays into giving advice to governments, as he candidly admitted in Nothing Is Sacred. In one essay in that book, he describes being whisked away to Moscow from his Cape Cod vacation in the summer of 1998; his advice to the Russian government that it set up a currency board was not taken. Nor was the South Korean government receptive to his advice to adopt the dollar as its currency and to abandon its resistance to foreign ownership of the country's banks.

Read the whole thing here.

Loungani reviewed Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization for reason here.

Comments

[robc]

Other activities for government could consist of "ensuring (but not producing) a baseline level of education, ..."

I have made a similar comment sometimes to people:
"Is your goal to support public education or to support public schools." Educating the public doesnt require (in fact, does better without) government schools.

While I agree with the standard libertarian position that vouchers arent libertarian either, they are still the lesser evil, and I dont think we are going to ever win the argument against public education. We can win against government schools though.

[JonAnon]

I never feared China until I read this paragraph:

Barro sees the experience of China-his association with a Chinese university now takes him to the country quite frequently-as bearing out these views. The country's experience under communism, he says, is a "testament to how badly governments can mess things up" when they try to exercise influence over all aspects of the economy. But now, he adds, he is struck by the "very capitalistic and pro-business" attitudes of government officials and of many of the people he encounters. "One of the universities there even has a statue of Adam Smith on campus. There would be mass protests at Harvard if we tried to do that," he jokes.

[Dave Krueger]

And conversely, it isn't hard to identify economists who were historically the darlings of governments BECAUSE they helped rationalize government interference in markets. The symbiosis between "experts" and government is not limited to economics, of course...

[joshua corning]

He also collated data on a long list of variables that, according to theorists, influence growth in incomes. The list included school enrollment rates (a proxy for what economists call "human capital"), private investment, and the size and nature of government activities. It also included measures of the economic system in place, government-induced distortions of markets, and political instability.

Barro examined the statistical associations between income growth and this list of variables. He found that "poor countries tend to catch up with rich countries if the poor countries have high human capital . . . but not otherwise." He also found that investments by governments did little to trigger growth and that other government spending actually detracted from growth. Political instability and market distortions tended to lower growth.

Sounds about right

[joshua corning]

The sad thing is that most readers at hit and run will not read this.