Whitlock on the NCAA and Cunningham on Whitlock and the NCAA

The contractual relationship between the NCAA and amateur athletes is the center of the sanctions imposed on USC by the NCAA.  Many, probably the majority of sports fans who have not played football or basketball at a major college, blame Bush for violating the contract.  Jason Whitlock leans into the wind blaming the exploitative nature of the contract and not Bush in “Expose the NCAA, not the athletes” an article that compares the NCAA contract to slavery and Jim Crow South based on a paragraph of Walter Byers, a former NCAA president (1951-1988) in this book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting the Student-Athlete.”  Whitlock quotes Byers

Byers wrote: “Today the NCAA Presidents Commission is preoccupied with tightening a few loose bolts in a worn machine, firmly committed to the neo-plantation belief that the enormous proceeds from college games belong to the overseers (administrators) and supervisors (coaches). The plantation workers performing in the arena may only receive those benefits authorized by the overseers.”

Carson Cunningham, a historian, takes umbrage with Whitlock’s comparison in “Whitlock Wrong to Compare NCAA with Slavery” by describing some abuses of slavery including the lynching of two men, William Crawford and Sam Smith, who opposing slavery, abuses that he believes renders Whitlock’s comparison offensive. 

In the article, which would be laughable if it weren't so sadly off-base, Mr. Whitlock declared, "Reggie Bush is Kunta Kinte, a runaway slave." Seriously? The same Reggie Bush who is slated to make about $8 million this season, who recently won a Super Bowl, and who buys multi-million-dollar property? If so, I'm sure Kunta Kinte could relate, as well as Mr. Crawford and Mr. Smith.

Mr. Whitlock also said, "At some point, we can recognize that an investigative journalism award and individual career advancement do not justify pretending there is some honor in safeguarding the NCAA's plantation. ... Call me when the phony moralizing stops and we, the media, quit demonizing black kids for cashing in like white men." Ahh, race-baiting at its best. Bravo, Mr. Whitlock.

Cunningham does not blindly endorse the NCAA model noting

…it has some wonderful elements to go along with numerous flaws. But that's not the point. The point is that nothing about the NCAA model even remotely approaches slavery.

My students who enjoy sports should read both articles and decide for themselves but I found the article informative and humorous if purposefully irreverent.  I am not offended by the comparison of NCAA regulations to slavery, or the Jim Crow South just as I am not offended by comparisons of Hitler to Noriega or Franco.  The latter three were dictators who were not afraid to deprive civil rights from the citizens they governed, fix elections, intimidate political rivals, or limit the press, but only one started a world war and conducted the Holocaust. 

Whitlock’s triplet, slavery, the Jim Crow South, and the NCAA contract are are systems of economic exploitation even though the NCAA contract is involves less offensie.  The NCAA exploits the large difference between what colleges can offer a young athlete and their next best alternative, their opportunity cost.  Being grossly underpaid and attending a big name school and maintaining a chance to turn pro beats the alternative of attending a community college at the athlete’s expense or entering the low-skill job market but it isn’t fair.  Athletes should receive compensation approximating the value of what they produce; in economic terms, their wages should equal the value of their marginal product.  They don’t.
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The NCAA's Infractions Findings on USC

As a disclaimer, I am a USC fan and have been for 40 years.  I am not a fan of the NCAA. 

People respond to incentives and college athletics is riddled with perverse incentives which are caused by the NCAA requirement that athletes be amateurs.  The NCAA rules state that

Student-athletes shall be amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, and their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental and social benefits to be derived.  Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.

College athletics is a multibillion dollar industry that rivals the NFL, NBA and MLB in revenues.  Unlike the other sports industries, the NCAA is tax exempt because of the amateur status of its athletes.  The NCAA and the universities it represents profit from the low wages and tax exempt status maintained by a strict definition of amateurism.  I believe that it is the desire to protect its tax exempt status and not concern for athletes that motivates their actions and to do this they have brilliantly convinced sports consumers that denying athletes in high profit sports nearly all the gains from their activities is moral.  No other students are denied profit from their education while they are in college.

NCAA rules have a socioeconomic and racial component.  Title IX, an affirmative action law designed to increase women's educational opportunities, has forced universities to better fund women's athletic programs to give female athletes the same educational opportunities as male athletes.  Universities have chosen to fund these programs largely with moneys earned by profitable college sports.  Minority athletes from poor households are over represented in football and basketball, the most profitable sports.  Because their wages are capped, the revenues that would be used to provide wages commensurate with their contribution to the team's profits are used to subsidize predominately non-minority athletes from wealthier households who compete in less profitable sports.  

Reading the findings on Reggie Bush made me feel dirty, not because of his actions or the action of his family, primarily his step-father, but because of the unwarranted intrusion on his family's financial affairs (see the report here).  Apparently, Bush grew up in a family that popular jargon would deem "working poor."  As Bush's star was rising, the family had accumulated credit card debt and was having problems paying rent.  If the NCAA is right, given the paucity of documentation and the credibility of their two primary accusers who are both felons, this is a big if, his step-father and then Bush himself took modest payments based on his future career earnings as an NFL player.  The money borrowed by the family was used to pay rent and credit card bills, and to attend Bush's football games.  The money borrowed by  was used to make a $4,000 down payment to buy 96 Impala valued at $19,000.  Nowhere do the findings show that the NCAA was concerned for the financial strain on Bush and his family created by their rule of amateurism. 

The NCAA has concluded that USC was somehow responsible for knowing that the Bush's parents could not afford their new rental home and that Bush could not afford the Impala.  I believe that a black family can improve their financial well being sufficiently to afford to rent a nicer but still modest home and buy their son a relatively inexpensive car without raising red flags.  The NCAA apparently believes that it is USC's responsibility to monitor the financial activities of all athletes and their families.  As an educator and former student, I am dumbfounded by the statement that, "participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental, and social benefits to be derived."  I love learning and always have but I went to college because I thought that it would increase my lifetime earnings.  I teach students who are attempting to do the same.  It is preposterous to force athletes to follow a standard of amateurism that everybody who can avoid that standard does.   

The NCAA rules continue, "student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.  According to the Free Dictionary, exploitation is  the "utilization of another person or group for selfish purposes."  The NCAA's rules on amateurism keep the honest agents at arms length until the athlete decides to turn pro, abandoning them to the least honest agents who don't mind dealing in shadows.  Can the NCAA explain how its rules don't exploit high value athletes or how allowing these athletes to tap into future incomes is exploitation?  Perhaps Bush would have been free to enjoy the "physical, mental and social benefits" of football knowing that his family was more financially secure and he was the cause.  The NCAA's outdated definition of amateurism should be on trial and not USC's athletes and not USC. 
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NCAA and Wages

I have argued that the NCAA restrictions on payments to athletes lowers their "wages" to levels well below what they would earn in a competitive labor market.  Lawrence Kahn quantifies the differential between what these athletes would earn without NCAA restrictions and what they actually earn in "Market: Cartel Behavior and Amateurism in College Sports" which was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Vol. 212, No. 1, Winter 2007).

Analysis using this framework [an empirical method to estimate wages of NCAA athletes] have been performed for college football, as well as men's and women's basketball.  In constant 2005 dollars, estimates of the marginal revenue product [wage] of a draft-quality player range from about $263,000 for women's basketball (based on the 2000-2001 season) (Brown and Jewell 2006, p. 98)  to $495,000 for college football (based on the 1995 season) and $1.422 million for men's college basketball (based on the 1995-1996 season) (Brown and Jewell, 2004, p. 159).  These estimates of the marginal revenue product of a draft-quality athlete can be compared to the compensation of college athletes.  According to NCAA rules, athletes are limited to receiving a scholarship and stipend, supplemented by up to $2,000 of earnings from a job during the school year (Zimbalist, 1999, p. 26).  Since the cost of tuition, fees, room, board, and incidentals comes to roughly $40,000 at private schools (and less in most cases for public schools), compensation is far below marginal revenue produce for these revenue-producing athletes. 

Lawrence also describes NCAA attempts to limit compensation of assistant coaches.

In 1991, the NCAA set a maximum compensation level for certain assistant at $12,000 during the year and $4,000 for any summer camp earnings.  Several antitrust suits were filed against the NCAA on behalf of the assistant coaches, and they were consolidated into one class action.  In 1995, a federal court decided for the plaintiffs, and damages to the coaches were ruled in 1998 to be $22.3 million, which under the treble damages provision of antitrust law were multiplied to $67 million.  The NCAA appealed, but the parties eventually settled for $55.5 million, to be divided among roughly 1,000 assistant coaches (Hamilton, 2003). 

The article contains a lot of interesting history and good economics.  I love their product but recognize that it is not an "amateur" product. The NCAA is a profit maximizing business.   
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A Reader Challenges the Premise of The Blind Side

A reader, TLC '80, challenged the premise of The Blind Side, that the NCAA placed onerous burdens on poor students.  The writer played a year of college football and has insights that a wannabe athlete with neither physical talent nor skills would not possess.  I did take a tour of USC as part of a baseball camp and learned that the athletics department spends $1 million annually on tutors.  They also send an employee to each class in which a student is enrolled to verify that the student is attending.  This is not proof that the departments or athletes value education but it is proof that compliance is expensive.  TLC '80 writes

I'm not sure I buy this premise. It may be designed to sell more books and promote a movie, rather than reflect reality. I played high school football in Dallas in the 70's, and went on to play at Texas Lutheran (for 1 year - injuries forced me to quit).

I had high school friends who played at the big schools -- A&M, Oklahoma, Texas, etc. These guys got paid by the backers (can you say Barry Switzer?). Some of my friends at the large schools got free cars, cash, and no-show "jobs" that allowed them to stay in school. This was all known and winked at throughout the old Southwest Conference. I'm sure it was just as bad in the other conferences.
We had the same problem then -- we played with middle-class white kids, and poor black kids. TLC (now TLU) won the NAIA Div III national title a few times -- and none of our players went on to the NFL. And I don't think any of them had any expectation that they would.

Now, I'm an old fart, and things have changed in 30 years (SMU death penalty, etc). But one of the problems that the NCAA faces (and some high school teams in TX with UIL do, too) is kids moving from school to school in search of scholarship money -- any money -- just to stay in school. And they'll treat the rules just like we treat taxes -- ("Anyone may arrange his affairs..." -- Learned Hand). Why should we be surprised when family and big-money (typically white) athletic supporters encourage all players to get right up to the line and push the edge of the rules, just as they do in their business and personal lives?

It has always been my position that college players should be paid a stipend (ok, salary) in order to remove some of the incentives to cheat. In my case, I never got any money from boosters (I wasn't very good), but I worked real jobs for real money, and there were no limits to what I could earn. I had a union job in the summer that paid $12 per hour (big money in the 70's) and that paid for my college.

Now in my day, we had no illusions that we would play pro ball. We wanted to earn that National Title ring, and then brag about it until our grand kids were bored of hearing about it.

I'm sure it's changed - there's a lot more money sloshing around - but this line that there are players who are "sustained by the hope" that they'll be pros is a stretch. We have schools who don't require them to show up for class, and the 60's "social promotion" is still going on in college. How in the world can we grant a college degree to someone who is functionally illiterate, and hasn't been to class in a semester or so? This is a problem at the teaching level (and the athletic program bringing in the big bucks). Why in the hell do we have tenured teachers if they won't stand up to the coach and the school and say "no" to giving passing grades to players who don't really pass?

Perhaps if we saw fewer "ganstas" like Michael Irvin sporting 10 carat diamond earrings, and a little better roll-models on the part of white and black players (active pro and retired), along with stipends, we could put a dent in this so-called problem.

But college is about education for life, and the athletics is secondary. THIS is the message that must be the basic premise of college admission counselors, coaches, and backers. I think a stipend for the players will slow down the use of big-name college programs as farm teams for the NFL. Let's get Jerry Jones to put a few of those millions to work at SMU or at Baylor instead of building billion-dollar stadiums.

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McGwire and Bradbury, the Sports Economist

For the third straight year, allegations of steroid use kept Mark McGwire from election into the Baseball Hall of Fame gathering only 23.7% of the vote in 2010.  This week, he acknowledged steroid use in a tearful apology.  As a preface to my remarks, I admit to liking McGwire.  He appeared more likable than many athletes.  In his rookie year, he hit 49 home runs, but forewent the opportunity to hit 50, sitting out two games to witness the birth of his first child.  When negotiating a contract, he signed with St. Louis Cardinals when other teams were offering more because he liked the cities and franchise's baseball tradition.  He gave a million a year to a charity helping abused children.  Joel Stein of Time provides a good biography in "Mark McGwire: Mark of Excellence."  It was written in 1998, before the steroid's scandal broke.  Is steroid use the only viable explanation for McGwire's performance?

J. C. Bradbury's book, "The Baseball Economist" is a must read for students who like baseball, economics and statistics.  He offers the hypothesis that baseball expansion is another explanation for the spike in home runs between 1998 and 2001 than steroids use.  Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 when the Los Angeles Angels and Washington Senators joined the American League.  His second highest home run total was 39.  Baseball expanded prior to the spike in 1993 and 1998.  The causal relationship is that as the league expands, talent becomes more dispersed.  On average, the best hitters face worse pitching, and vice versa.  Bradbury writes,

What does this say about the current ear of baseball history, especially given the intense public focus on steroids as the cause of the increased number of home runs?  Pitching talent is more dispersed than it has ever been, while hitting talent is still quite concentrated.  It means there are plenty of batters out there who are able to take advantage of bad pitchers.  A more dispersed pitching talent pool gives the best hitters greater opportunities against weaker talent, which ought to lead them to perform extreme feats...

Also, if low-quality pitchers are hitting more batters, shouldn't better pitchers benefit from facing more bad hitters as hitting talent has become less compressed since the 1980s?  In fact, they do, as pitchers increased their strikeout rates over the same span....

Bradbury concludes,

The fact that talent dilution may be part of the cause for the great performances of players does not mean that steroids have not influenced the game.  However, it's certainly incorrect to say that steroids, or other performance-enhancing drugs, are the only explanation. 

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Hamilton and the College Football Playoffs

James Hamilton, one of my favorite economists, at Econbrowser, one of my favorite blogs, wrote the following post.  

Since Congress and the President are taking positions on a college football playoff system, it must be time for Econbrowser to weigh in as well.

I want to suggest first that the purpose of a playoff cannot be to determine the best team in the country. I say that for two reasons. First, there is no such thing as the best team in the country. Different teams have different strengths and weaknesses that will match up differently against different opponents. In any given game, anything can happen. In 2007, for example, Appalachian State beat Michigan who beat Florida who beat Kentucky who beat the supposed national champions LSU. So you've either got to declare Appalachian State the best team in the country, or drop your insistence on transitivity.

Second, if you do believe in such a thing as the (probabilistically) best team in the country, the more teams you put in the playoffs, the less likely it is that the best team ends up being declared the champion. Suppose for example that there's a team that with 80% probability would win its game against any other team that might make the playoffs. With a single championship game, that superior team gets declared the champion with probability 80%. With a 4-team playoff, the best team must win both its games, the probability of which is (0.8)(0.8) = 0.64. With an 8-team playoff, the best team is only going to be declared the champion about half the time.

I therefore suggest that the primary purpose of the system is not so much to determine "the" best team as it is to bring enjoyment and satisfaction to the fans. Granted, the proposed playoff games themselves would do that very well for the handful of teams and games that get included in the playoffs, but at the cost of subtracting from the excitement of the 30 or so other post-season games that would have to be diminished as a result. Of course, the parties with a vested financial stake in those other games are for that precise reason opposed to the playoff idea, and that opposition is the main reason it hasn't yet happened. But if you took the objective to be to maximize the economic surplus of all the post-season games combined, I say you'd want to stick with a system like the present one. The lobbying power of those vested interests is precisely a lobby on behalf of maximizing total economic surplus.

But whatever you may think of the merits of a college football playoff, doesn't it bother you to see the U.S. Congress acting as if it's the nation's ruler on this matter?

It does me. Which is why I wrote this.

I wish that I had written this post.  I should add that I would love to see the NCAA institute a playoff system, but I am deeply offended that the U.S. Congress is "acting as if it's the nation's ruler on this matter."  My thanks goes to Rep. John Barrow, Ga, who was apparently the only no vote on this bad bipartisan legislation (follow the Congress link). 
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The N.F.L. and Dementia

Most fans know that football is hard on players' bodies. This is a reason that careers are short and salaries are high. The danger of the sport is part of the supply function of players. Alan Schwarz reports on a raging debate about a new health threat in a New York Times article, "N.F.L. Study Finds Link to Dementia."

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

The N.F.L. has long denied the existence of reliable data about cognitive decline among its players. These numbers would become the league’s first public affirmation of any connection, though the league pointed to limitations of this study.

The findings could ring loud at the youth and college levels, which often take cues from the N.F.L. on safety policies and whose players emulate the pros. Hundreds of on-field concussions are sustained at every level each week, with many going undiagnosed and untreated.

A detailed summary of the N.F.L. study, which was conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, was distributed to league officials this month.

The study has not been peer-reviewed, but the findings fall into step with several recent independent studies regarding N.F.L. players and the effects of their occupational head injuries.

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Wheelan and the Little League Arms Race

(HT Mankiw) I have a son who has come up through the modern Little League making Charles Wheelan's remarks in "Stop the Little League Arms Race," posted by Yahoo Finance on July 23, 2009 of personal as well as professional interest.   He begins by explaining how economists define an arms race and how it applies to youth athletics.

Economists use "arms race" to describe any situation in which some competition leads to a bad outcome for all the parties involved...

I'm convinced that young athletes (or, more accurately, their parents) are locked in an arms race...In any case, the youth sports competition could leave all our kids worse off, [Wheelan later mentions injuries that were uncommon in youth players not long ago.] not entirely unlike bankrupt airlines or countries struggling to manage huge defense budgets.

I have heard the same complaint over and over again since becoming a parent:  kids' sports are becoming ridiculously competitive.  There are 8-year-olds with private hitting coaches, and 9-year-olds being told that they have no future in a sport if they are not playing in competitive leagues during the off-season...

If everyone practices three times as much, the same folks will probably end up with the scholarships, prize money and Nike endorsements.  And if we assume that the extra practice, coaching and spending on equipment comes at the expense of other things (like riding a bike for fun, playing other sports or doing something really crazy like playing "kick the can" in the backyard for a few hours), then our kids' lives are worse for it.

But no one alone can stop what is going on in youth sports.  That's the insidious part of an arms race or a price war.  If you are the only family who pulls your kid out of winter Little League, then he is going to do poorly relative to other kids who play year-round.

One of my sons is very competitive and loves baseball.  He is a bright child, and realizes just how unique professional players are, and harbors little hope of a professional career.  He does hope to play high school baseball, and that even being a competitive player at this level will be difficult.  He is dropping out of football to concentrate on baseball.  To aid him in his goals, I have become a minor participant in the arms race, I can attest to its high cost.  I have purchased good equipment but generally not the best: two bats, a thin barrel for Little League, and a big barrel for select, a fielder's glove, first basemen's glove, and catchers mitt as well as other catcher's gear, shoes, well over 100 balls, team dues, uniforms, and from time to time I have paid for hitting, fielding and pitching lessons.  For those who have not priced equipment, and good bat cost about $200 and needs to be replaced about every 18 months as a child grows.  He has played in the Little League for 6 years and on a select team for two.  Finding a select team for him to play on was difficult because we place church activities above sports and select teams play in tournaments that begin on Saturday and end on Sunday.  Few teams want a Saturday only player.  It has hurt him competitively. 

Wheelan identifies a potential problem.

If all of this makes kids and young families happier than they were 20 years ago, terrific.  But I don't think that's what is going on.  As far as I can tell, sports have three purposes: To get exercise, to have fun or to get your kid into college, earn a scholarship, turn professional and become rich and famous.

The evolution in youth sports appears to be mostly about the third one.  Here's the problem with that:  The number of scholarships (and college athletes) is more or less fixed.  So is the number of professional athletes and the total amount of money to be won on the PGA Tour.

I believe that Wheelan has correctly identified the three purposes of youth sports, but I do not agree that most parents involve their kids in athletics for scholarships and big money alone.  I know dozens of young baseball players and their parents and although many parents and players hope for fame and fortune, all the players enjoy high levels of competition.  These players are not just competitive in baseball, they are competitive in everything they believe is important.

Wheelan is certainly correct when he states that the number is scholarships and positions in professional athletics is more or less fixed and if parents are engaged in a battle to win those positions they are truly participating in a zero sum game with escalating costs.  He correctly points out that education is more likely to benefit our youth.

It's crucial to recognize the difference between intensive athletic practices and something like studying.  Competitive athletic success is a zero sum game.  There will be the same number of major league players making the same salaries if everyone in the world became twice as good at playing baseball.  A-Rod would still be on the Yankees, not you.  He'd just be twice as good as he is now.

Studying, on the other hand, makes people smarter, more educated and more productive.  And that makes your life better, regardless of what everyone else is doing.  Economic productivity is not a zero sum game.  If we all became twice as smart, we would all be richer, healthier, safer and so on.  As the United States became steadily more educated and richer over the past 200 years, no one on the planet had to get poorer.

From my small sample, youth baseball players are in the top half of their classes academically.  Parents certainly value education even if they underestimate its value in comparison to baseball or overestimate its value in earning an education.  In the end, Wheelan's question must be answered empirically.  Why do parents pay so much for their kids to play baseball?

The arms race in baseball may also say something about the future typical player.  Major League Baseball players may come from average to above average income homes because parents on the lower end of the income distribution cannot compete in the arms race.
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Big Brother on the Gridiron

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah urged the Justice Department to investigate college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) for violations of antitrust laws.  The BCS grants automatic bids and higher revenues to traditionally strong conferences (Frederic Frommer, "Hatch calls for Justice Department  investigation into BCS," rivals.com, July 7, 2009).  I don't like the BCS, but not liking something does not imply government oversight is required or even desirable. 

Hatch is accusing the NCAA of violating antitrust laws.  He is not concerned with the low wages college athletes are paid given their contributions to a valuable product (see "A Union I Could Support").  He is concerned that a team from Utah was treated unfairly but this does not justify a Senate subcommittee hearing.  Business leaders should be free of a senatorial hissy fit.  It is an indication that our elected officials have too much power.  Is the NCAA concerned about government intervention?  Frommer provides a quote from Harvey Perlman, chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the new chairman of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee.

“We are university presidents, and we are sensitive to what Congress thinks, and sensitive about what the president thinks,” Perlman added, referring to President Barack Obama’s stated preference for a playoff system. “But our primary responsibility is to manage our institutions in ways that protect student athletes, that acknowledges their academic pursuits as well as their athletic pursuits.”

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The NBA Salary Cap

The bad economy is affecting the NBA. ESPN reports in "2010 cap may limit signings," (July 8, 2009) that the NBA will lower its salary cap and luxury-tax threshold.

In a memo announcing next season's salary cap and luxury-tax threshold, sent out shortly before the league's annual July moratorium on signings and trades was lifted at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, NBA teams also received tentative projections from the league warning that the cap is estimated to drop to somewhere between $50.4 million and $53.6 million for the 2010-11 season.

The official league memorandum, obtained by ESPN.com, forecasts a dip in basketball-related income in the 2009-10 season of 2.5 percent to 5 percent, which threatens to take the 2010-11 cap down some $5 million to $8 million from last season's $58.7 million salary cap.

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Experts Vs Partisans

I love college football; my favorite team is Southern Cal and it has been since I was ten. I love tailgating before the game, and walking into the stadium in a wave of cardinal. Then the game starts. USC defers to the second half. Ray Maualuga smacks a back for a five yard loss and the band plays Conquest. Mark Sanchez hits Patrick Turner on a slant up the middle for a thirty yard gain and the band plays Conquest. The band plays Conquest a lot. After the game, the players, the band, and the fans gather at one end of the stadium to chant traditional cheers, often led by players. I love being a fan and surrounded by other fans.

If I had money on the game, I would not listen to my fellow fans; I wouldn’t even trust my own opinion. As a fan, I have too much skin in the game. With money on the line, I would look at a computer model, or read what an expert or experts say. I would also try to get a consensus opinion of experts by looking at the Las Vegas betting line, or prediction markets. Experts and aggregations of experts somehow stay above the fray and remain objective.

There is a similar relationship between economists, politicians, and citizens; economists are the experts and politicians are the players, the media, the band, and voters, the fans. Politicians and voters are partisans, allegiance to the team comes before objectivity. Politicians enact policy through law, and economists study the impact of policy and advise politicians. Politicians need good positive economics to achieve their normative goals. But if I were a politician, I would like to know my advisors had my back, and would not hire an advisor unwilling to show allegiance to me.

Economists advising politicians walk a fine line between holding to their science and remaining objective, or becoming partisans. Occasionally, a good advisor might contradict the politicians they advise as did Greg Mankiw when he said,

Romney has had to distance himself from his top economics adviser after Mankiw _ a Princeton-trained economist now teaching at Harvard _ voiced his support for an immigration bill Romney strongly opposes [1].

At some point, an economist must become a partisan, or at least bit his tongue when his team supports policy that contradicts good science as Greg Mankiw did when he supported tax cuts that important Bush administration officials said would raise tax revenues. Mankiw is on the record as stating that tax cuts don’t increase tax revenue. He took incoming fire from fellow economists for his silence, but defended himself by parsing words, noting that, “Being opposed to a tax cut as a policy and being critical of an argument for tax cuts are two different things. [2]” In response to Mankiw’s relative silence and awkward position on the revenue impact of the tax cut, Brad DeLong noted,

Mankiw was indeed correct in thinking that he personally could do more good for the country and the world working inside than if he were to march up to Dick Cheney, tell him "you have to stop saying that tax cuts raise revenues," and so get fired. But the Bush administration did frequently argue that tax cuts raised revenue. And there is the much harder question: is it worth the sacrifice of the economics profession's outside credibility and the further confusion of the public that is entailed when good economists defend bad policies on the outside that they are working to change on the inside? I don't know the answer to that.

The world has need for both experts and partisans, and it is difficult to do both simultaneously. Anyone who reads my blog for any period of time will note that I do not like economists surrendering their science for partisanship. I believe that most economists share my sentiments. I hope that I can be fair. Best wishes to the Obama economics team that now must walk that fine line.

[1] Glen Johnson, “Romney Finds Advisors Both Help And Hurt,” The Washington Post, June 19, 2007.

[2] Nathan Strauss, “Mankiw Defends Tax Cut Stance, Faces Online Flak,” The Harvard Crimson, July 13, 2007.

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