Posted on 09/26/2011 7:55:10 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
I've been saying for some time that Barack Obama is the most economically ignorant president since Zachary Taylor, but I increasingly fear I've been doing the general a disservice. It's not just erroneous economics, but sheer ignorance of markets and economics.
You see it in periodic comments of the President. Perhaps the most famous came when he said that ATMs and airport ticket kiosks lead to unemployment: “When you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.” (An interesting tidbit - do a Google search for this - you'll see the comment was more or less uncommented upon in the "mainstream media.") He's used this a couple times, here also blaming internet travel sites.
But there have been numerous others, as when he explained that auto companies had to make more electric cars in order to satisfy the market. This showed a titanic ignorance of how markets work, the President apparently of the belief that "the market" was what a central planner decided was needed, not what consumers actually wanted. He shows know concept of consumer preference, the subjective value of goods and services, or even the role of prices in providing information to firms.
Now comes this quote from Ron Suskind's book, Confidence Men:
"Both [Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Christina Roemer and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers] were concerned by something the President had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled.
“What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could be coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.”
So our President really does think productivity is bad for the economy. As economist Scott Sumner says, "So for 200 years rapid productivity growth didn’t cause any serious unemployment problems in America, but now, right after NGDP collapses, we are to believe it is producing mass unemployment, even though recent productivity gains have been rather low. I’m at a loss for words. We elected a Luddite as President of the United States."
It appears to me that your delicate Luddite sensibilities have been violated by this blog post, when the concern you expressed in your very first post wasn't even addressed.
BULLETIN: Obama has decided to replace Tim Geithner. Obama will announce that the CEO of Susie’s Lemonade will serve as his chief economic adviser as well as Secretary of the Treasury. Obama was said to have made the decision after witnessing her incredible ability to create jobs on TV.
BULLETIN: Obama has decided to replace Tim Geithner. Obama will announce that the CEO of Susie’s Lemonade will serve as his chief economic adviser as well as Secretary of the Treasury. Obama was said to have made the decision after witnessing her incredible ability to create jobs on TV.
Yes, he is - and so are far too many Americans who still think he’s doing a good job with the economy. Good grief, what does it take to wake some people up?
There may be confusion because an ATM is so directly dependent upon information technology. It would not exist without it. The reverse is not true; that is, a human clerk was able to benefit from the productivity increase due to information technology by accessing account information through a computer prior to the invention of the ATM.
The term "internet website" is even trickier. We certainly had reference librarians who would respond to a customer request for information. Perhaps we should refer to the internet as an "Automated Librarian Machine", among other things.
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