Saturday, December 10, 2005

An interview with Gregory Mankiw, back to Harvard after 2 years of being Chief Economic Adviser to Mr. Bush

What I find most interesting in this interview- next to the glimpse inside the White House having as guide a former Chief of the Council of Economic Advisers- is the part that characterizes Bush's "economic thinking". I find Mankiw very subtle and diplomatic- he's got style, definitely. Here we go:

I think he's got a great intuition for economics—he doesn't think like an economist in the sense of thinking in terms of equations and graphs. He was an undergraduate history major and that's a pretty good description of how he thinks about things. He thinks about things more intuitively, more verbally. But he also has an MBA and so he thinks about things very much from the standpoint of what institutional framework is going to allow businesses to flourish and allow markets to work. I had the opportunity once to spend the weekend with him, and John Snow and Steve Friedman at Camp David. When I came back from that weekend I sent him a thank you note and I included a copy of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom because I thought that was a book that he would very much relate to. It's very good economics, it's free market economics, but it explains economics verbally. It talks about economics as individuals speak, rather than as we teach in the classroom with graphs and equations.

1 comment:

Sebi Buhai said...

and what I forgot to mention. Mankiw makes an excellent point in this interview about why some people (basically those untrained in economics plus not trained at all...) don't understand the principles of free trade and comparative advantages. Extremely well put, for instance, that USA as a net exporter of services. Anyways, I'll get back to free trade vs. protectionism in other future entries as well.