Austan Goolsbee on Politics and Academia

At The Atlantic, Megan McArdle profiles Austan Goolsbee, outgoing chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers:

But really, people place absurd demands on academics who become political advisers: They want former professors to publicly criticize their boss’s policies as if in an academic seminar. And they grouse if the politicians don’t make policy as if they, too, were living inside a theoretical model. This is not reasonable—and criticizing people who can’t meet this impossible goal seems likely to diminish the quality of the advice, not improve the quality of the policy.

“There’s a certain kind of academic that comes to Washington and can’t survive,” Goolsbee said. “They’re the ones starting each sentence with ‘The economic model says.…’ They are prone to silver-bullet-style answers, which demonstrate very sophisticated thinking about the model but very unsophisticated thinking about the real world.” The model may be missing a few things that are found in the real world—not least, the institutional and political obstacles that make some problems silver-bullet-proof. “If you’re going to be an academic who’s involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists,” Goolsbee told me. “I was always a data guy, not a theorist. Theorists can maintain total purity. The data are always messy.”

Goolsbee expects to take some heat for his administration’s actions, and for his loyalty, especially because he’s going back to the University of Chicago—where a graduate-school applicant once said during an interview that he wanted to do public finance and was told, “At Chicago, we don’t consider that a field.” Goolsbee seems unfazed by the prospect. “I have no doubt that there will be some heated arguments in the seminar rooms and in the hallways. But in some sense, that’s why I want to get back to Chicago. If you want to be repeatedly told by your own allies, ‘Oh, yes, we are 100 percent right; those other guys are crazy,’ then Washington is more for you.”