Casey Mulligan, Phone Your Home Planet!

Casey Mulligan is a professor of economics at University of Chicago, famous enough to have a New York Times blog, but not quite famous enough to be among the 20 odd Mulligans who rate a Wikipedia page. He is pretty wrongheaded, but that's hardly an excuse to target him - that quality is plenty abundant. It's more that he is wrongheaded, loud, and has a prominent pulpit. So how wrong is he? How about some samples from before his latest outrage:

Here he is a year ago, explaining that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong so we didn't really need a stimulus:

So, if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry. The current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming, and we should reconsider whether it is worth it to spend $700 billion to bring it down to 5.9 percent.

A bit later he explained unemployment:

Unlike in the severe recessions of the 1930s and early 1980s, productivity has been rising. Through the third quarter of 2008, productivity had risen six consecutive quarters, with an increase of 1.9 percent over the past three, or 0.7 percent above the trend for the previous 12 quarters.

Because productivity has been rising — almost as much as the Douglas formula predicts — the decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).

People just don't want to work, you see. He predicted, of course, that the effect would be temporary, which is why this recession has been so short and mild:

My gross domestic product prediction is that by late 2009 or 2010, GDP should be 6 percent higher than it
was when the housing market crashed. Employment growth should be 3 percent.

And this is just from the garbage left on the U of Chicago "experts" web site. This is a guy not existing in the real universe. Apparently the wackos at Chicago agree. The past year doesn't seem to have made him smarter, either. He is still opining for the NYT - they aren't any smarter either. His latest: The More the Merrier: Population Growth Promotes Innovation. Underdeveloped countries should be encouraged to have large populations, he says.

The more people on earth, the greater the chance that one of them has an idea of how to improve alternative energies, or to mitigate the climate effects of carbon emissions. It takes only one person to have an idea that can benefit many.

Plus, the more people on earth, the larger are the markets for new innovations.

This is logic Chicago style, folks. It would be hard to find statements less grounded in history or common sense. More importantly, it's a speculation in an area where data is abundant. Look at gapminder's data for the past half century. The inverse correlation between fertility rate and gdp growth is huge and unequivocal.

Stupid is not an adequate word for what Mulligan is doing here. He can't be that dumb. He has got to be either nuts or lying. And what's the matter with the NYT that they publish such obvious drivel.

Hat tip, Brad DeLong.

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