Your Humble Blogger is still, slowly, working his way through Whitehall, by Peter Hennesy (New York: Free Press © 1989). It's not actually that terrific a book, but it has led me to question a few things that I had taken for granted. Such as...
Once you accept that a government will be spending large sums of money on various things (possibly including, but not limited to, national defense, infrastructure, law enforcement, health care, housing, research, archiving, and the administration of those), it becomes important to know not only how much money it is currently spending, but how much money it will be spending in the near future. That is, in order to budget at all, you need to be able to make certain predictions. Among those predictions are a lot of things having to do with the macro-economy. Particularly for services and entitlements, in order to have the vaguest guess how much to allocate, you need both a demographic prediction and a means/needs prediction.
OK, so the government hires economists to make those predictions. In the US, the federal executive has OMB and the Council of Economic Advisors, and the federal legislature has, er, I've forgotten. Anyway, they exist, and they need to exist.
But have you ever thought about just how powerful they are? Well, yes, you probably have, as somebody points it out, every time the budget is based on impossibly optimistic projections or such. Usually, the point people are trying to make at the time is how irresponsibly the reports of the economists are being treated. What I was marveling at is simply that they are necessary. Even the best conceivable, most impartial, honest, and apolitical government economist has incredible power to cause resources to be allocated one way or another.
And there's nothing to be done about it. It's sort of a law of nature, really: once you get past the size of a small town, the activities of a government can only be efficient to the extent that its economists predictions are accurate. Dismal, eh?
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Just a quick mention that this seems to me like a greatly underplayed aspect of the whole “government by the people” vs. “government by the elite” argument.
I won’t belabor the dismal, though it’s hard to suppress the urge.