Economy who is to blame

Her research focuses on the formation and effects of economic and financial news. His research interest is in economic and financial news, as well as on the production and effects of infotainment. His broad research agenda includes media coverage of political actors, social movements and economic processes, and the subsequent impact of this coverage on public opinion. See Supplementary Appendix for the exact wording of the questions and information about the order of the items.

All numbers can be retrieved from the digital archives of Statistics Netherlands: www. Since the Christian Democrats CDA were part of the coalition during the crisis years, it might be that economic evaluations of this party are also affected by responsibility attributions. We did not measure the perceived economic performance of individual parties, but additional analyses reveal that general support for the CDA in terms of vote propensity is not affected by attribution of crisis responsibility to the government.

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British Journal of Political Science , 40 1 , — Peffley M. Economic conditions and party competence: Processes of belief revision. The Commerce Department reported today Friday that the economy grew only 1. The economy has stalled. Unemployment is still in the stratosphere and shows no sign of improving. The housing market is worsening. What to do? The Republican story is simple.

The answer is less government. Cut taxes and spending, privatize, and deregulate. Obama and the Democrats respond by defending their specific policies. The stimulus worked, they say, as did the bailout of Wall Street , because the economy is better today than it would be without them. If anything, we need more stimulus. And healthcare reform will protect tens of millions. A large and growing segment of the public believes none of this. They blame either government or its counterpart in the private sector — big business and Wall Street.

Twenty years ago, 42 percent of Americans said they trusted government to do what was right just about always or most of the time. Cancel Send. Please select an option. Choose an option Please wait, fetching the form. Get our weekly newsletters. Make your inbox smarter. Select Newsletters. Email required Password required Remember me?

Email required Sunday newsletter. Sign in with Facebook Google Microsoft Twitter. Enter your password to confirm. Cancel Yes, cancel. Edit Newsletter Preferences. Cancel Save. Set up Notification. Cancel Confirm. Last, assume that journals are divided into different religions: Catholic journals, Baptist journals, Jewish journals, Buddhist journals, Islamic journals, Greek Orthodox journals, Flying Spaghetti Monster journals, etc.

Everything else being equal, whichever religion starts out as the largest has the inside track to being the one that can claim the top of the ranking.

Also note that while it is also likely that there will be more Catholic journals, thus lowering citations per journal, simulations suggest that the very act of creating a ranking in the first place then creates an advantage for those who come out on top after the first calculation.

This is precisely what happens in economics. Our Catholicism is the school of thought called Neoclassicism and our St. Peter is comprised of the university department chairs, deans, and presidents who are forced to try to maximize their position in the various rankings published by US News and World Report and the like.

The result is cookie cutter departments, with everyone desperately trying to look better than everyone else but by the exact same set of criteria! So much for the theory of comparative advantage or for developing unique niches within the discipline. All this means that while innovative research is possible, it actually has to be within some pretty narrow confines.

Nor is this the fault of Neoclassicism, per se. If any school of thought were to achieve a position as dominant as theirs, it would have the same impact. Either be Catholic or go to hell—which is definitely not what I learned in twelve years of Catholic school!

Mainstream economists have next to no knowledge of the schools of thought that did the best job of forecasting the Financial Crisis. The story so far is that economists write to impress each other along a narrow range of topics and theories as dictated by the hierarchy of journals.

If all the other schools of thought and areas of study are the economic equivalent of alchemy, then this should be encouraging.

Suffice it to say that there exists in economics a much broader range of approaches than just Neoclassicism and I think one would be hard pressed to dismiss these out of hand. I have learned something unuique and useful from every single one.

But I would argue and have elsewhere that Neoclassicism hardly has a monopoly on the truth. Indeed, when we look at who saw the Financial Crisis coming, their track record is actually pretty grim.

Prominent mainstream economists have claimed that no one saw it coming. The picture painted is one of a discipline that failed miserably at job 1. This is only true, however, if we exclude from the definition of the discipline non-mainstream schools of thought. In point of fact there were actually a number of economists who correctly anticipated the coming collapse both in terms of the timing and the causes. I do not mean Polyannas, who regularly preached the end of the world and therefore had to be right at some point, nor do I mean those who used tea leaves and listened to mysterious voices.

Not a single one of those identified used Neoclassically-based models. By the way, the journal in which that study is published is ranked It is safe to say that the average economist has never seen it. In macroeconomics, it means the assumption that the economy tends to come to full employment automatically so long as no obstacles stand in its way and that it is not particularly important to model the financial sector beyond saying that changes in the money supply can affect interest rates.

So let me offer some evidence. Just as there is no regularity in the timing of business cycles, there is no reason why cycles have to occur at all. The prevailing view among economists is that there is a level of economic activity, often referred to as full employment, at which the economy could stay forever emphasis added. According to their view, all we need to do is sit back and let the economy take care of us. On top of that, popular macro models like Real Business Cycles build into their assumptions the idea that all unemployment is voluntary.

The same is true of Monetarism.