Jared Bernstein is a former chief economist for Joe Biden and has lately been everywhere talking about economics from a left-center/progressive viewpoint. Thus I was mildly surprised by his latest op-ed in the Washington Post, because I found myself in simple agreement with him. Here’s Jared:

Recent events have exposed a hole in the middle of economists’ knowledge of key economic parameters: We know neither the unemployment rate at full employment nor the potential level of gross domestic product (GDP).

Those sentiments have been at the heart of some of my recent letters. The models used and the assumptions made by most mainstream economists, both center-right and center-left, more often than not demonstrate that we don’t really know the basics, and we keep suggesting policy measures to political types as though we did know. And then we wonder why economics gets accused of being political.

The simple fact is that politicians bring in their “pet economists” to tell them what they want to hear. I am reminded of Paul Simon’s line, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Bernstein is right, we should recognize the limits of what we as economists actually know and maybe be a little less strident in our advice. Or at least stop claiming the advice is based on accurate models. We should be very careful to reveal the assumptions in our models so that the educated layman who follows the arguments can understand the implicit bias in the models. And there are very few models that don’t have some kind of implicit bias. I turn you over to Jared Bernstein now.