Harvard professor Jason Furman says E.J. Antoni “is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner.” Furman’s view is the consensus, though the latter is frequently wanting. Think how serious economists believe to this day that government spending boosts economic growth, that growth causes prices to rise, and that war is economically stimulative.
Which is a comment that broad disdain for Antoni among economists doesn’t mean much. Economics is ridiculous.
Antoni believes Trump can do no wrong, which makes him far more like an economist than economists realize. See the near universal disdain among the PhDs for the economic programs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan when they entered office. Throw them all out.
Throw the BLS out too. Furman and others cast reverential glances toward the BLS because it employes so many serious economists, and since Antoni isn’t serious, they don’t want him polluting the water there. The view here is let him pollute. He’ll do us a favor, though Antoni won’t know why he’ll do us a favor. He’s an economist after all…
Antoni’s good deed for us all is rooted in his belief that President Trump walks on water. The latter bothers Furman, who describes Antoni as “an extreme partisan.” True, it makes your skin crawl, but applied to the BLS this is a good thing.
Seriously, it’s only a matter of time before Antoni’s partisanship will be reflected in the unemployment number reported by the BLS. Which is what President Trump wants. Antoni isn’t being hired to reveal what economists imagine is the truth.
Which means Furman’s critiques are real, but what an obnoxious conceit. What about employment and the dynamism underlying it would economists understand? Why does anyone care what the rate of unemployment is in the first place? And if the answer is that it looms large in inflation, see above. See the last 45 years. Unemployment has been very low much of that time, but contra broadly accepted economic wisdom, it hasn’t resulted in inflation.
It raises a question: who cares what economists think, whether it’s partisans like Antoni, the allegedly non-partisan types he’ll employ, or Furman himself? Lest readers forget, Furman’s solution to the tragic lockdowns in 2020 foisted on us by Republicans (most notably by Antoni’s hero, Trump) and Democrats was more government spending, the very spending that subsidized much longer stretches of lockdown across the country.
It's a long way of saying that the problem with economists isn’t E.J. Antoni, it’s economists. This includes individuals who practice it like Furman. He literally believes that wealth produced by all of us, and that’s taken from us, can stimulate growth if after being taken from us it’s handed out in politicized fashion. Antoni’s commentary is certainly ridiculous, but how is it different from the magic proposed by “qualified” economists?
Furman once again fears Antoni’s ability to credibly measure unemployment, but that’s the genius of Antoni. His perceived ineptitude and obvious partisanship will wake those so deluded as to care about the unemployment number up to the happy reality that payroll company ADP calculates its own unemployment number each month, and minus the $600 million annual cost of the BLS.
Translated, we don’t need the BLS to know the employment situation in the U.S. Which is the beauty of E.J. Antoni. If he’s as bad as Furman thinks he is, his awfulness will cause a shift to private producers of data that don’t cost anything. Even better, Antoni will hopefully wake us up to the unimportance of these numbers as is. Hong Kong thrived for quite some time without them, can’t we?
