Obama-nomics

Economic Principals explains obamanomics really well. It's at least going to be some behavioral economics, with insights from people like Cutler, the Romers and Goolsbee on other matters. I wonder if Goolsbee will be Treasurer if elected the way Summers was for Clinton. If so, my heart will rise up. Here's a couple of good quotes. The first from health economist, Victor Fuchs, then followed by comments about Obama:

"At the root of most of our major choices about social problems are choices about values. What kind of people are we? What kind of life to we want to lead? What is our vision of the good society? How much weight do we want to give to individual freedom? How much to equality? How much to security? How much to material progress? If we emphasize only individual responsibility, we come close to recreating “the jungle,” with all the freedom and all the insecurity and inequality that prevails in the jungle. On the other hand, if we ignore individual responsibility and rely entirely on social responsibility, the best we can hope for is the security of a well-run “zoo.”

Short-term, rapidly-shifting matters of policy aside – the business cycle, the war in Iraq – the 2008 election has been framed by Barack Obama precisely as a wide-ranging discussion of the various tensions between individual and social responsibility. This is a man who has spent his adult life at the epicenter of a pair of powerful movements with their headquarters on the south side of Chicago, first as a community organizer for the Saul Alinsky-inspired Calumet Community Religious Conference, then as a lecturer on constitutional law at the Milton-Friedman/Aaron Director/Ronald Coase/George Stigler-inspired University of Chicago Law School.

You thought it was a big deal when the first Chicago economist took a seat on the Council of Economic Advisers (William Niskanen in 1981)? The chances are that the United States is about to get a president from Chicago’s Hyde Park – and learn something in the process about the difference between a liberal and a libertarian.