Mr. Davidson's Planet: NPR/NYT Guru Adam Davidson's Discredited Economic Principles

You’d be hard-pressed to find a discipline that shapes our world more than economics, and yet none has weaker foundations or more misguided evangelists. The rise of economic guru du jour Adam Davidson, the co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money” and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, is perhaps one of the most disturbing illustrations of this unfortunate fact.

The Curious Field of Economics

Not too long ago, I asked Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz how many economists he met still adhered to the Chicago School free market approach, otherwise known as Neoliberal economics, that was proven to be severely flawed by the recent economic crash.

“About 60 percent,” said Stiglitz.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“For the most simple human reason of all,” Stiglitz told me. “People don’t like to admit that they’re wrong.”

True, that. Economists don’t like to acknowledge that the models they built their careers upon, taught students to believe, wrote papers in support of, published books in homage to – in short, the models that have driven their careers -- are poppycock. When new information and advances in fields like mathematics or physics have occurred, practitioners have had to do reassessments. Newtonian physics had to be updated, for example, because realities asserted by Albert Einstein led to a reexamination of the science that produced a better, stronger field with greater capacity to predict and describe reality.

But economists are peculiarly slow to come to grips with reality. And what about economic journalists? There is Paul Krugman, the rare serious economist who writes for a broad audience, engaged in the Sisyphean task of pushing back on storm force economic nonsense day after day. Deserving of a Nobel Prize in patience to go along with the one he received in economics, Krugman argues, explains, provides facts, and demystifies mystifications.

And then there are writers like Adam Davidson, who purports to “demystify complicated economic issues” for the public. Mr. Davidson has helpfully gone on record saying that journalists are too reluctant to acknowledge their own ignorance. He has warned of the danger of people believing dangerous and stupid things. Unfortunately, nothing is more conducive to this outcome that Mr. Davidson’s own commentary.

Mr. Davidson possesses gifts as a storyteller--gifts that make him very dangerous. As an economic observer, he commands an extremely powerful platform. Mr. Davidson wants to make us think that he’s one of us. You know, just a curious guy without formal training in economics who wants to know how things work. But in reality he is what we might call a “One Percent Whisperer”—a salesman for conservative economic philosophy who regurgitates ruinous myths that have led to policies that depress prosperity and chuck justice out the window. Take a quick look at the most recent example of his one percent apologia, “What Does Wall Street Really Do for You?” and you’ll get an idea of where he’s really coming from.

Financial blogger and author Yves Smith (whose Naked Capitalism website is a must-read for the financially-literate) noted that Mr. Davidson’s recent column, "The Other Reason Europe is Going Broke," “manages the impressive feat of making you stupider than before you read it.” She catalogues the misrepresented facts and appeals to American prejudices that form the hallmark of Mr. Davidson’s work. Other experts have similarly sounded the alarm: Economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has repeatedly called out Mr. Davidson’s technical distortions and failure to comprehend basic macroeconomic principles on his blog. (See: “Adam Davidson Gets Stimulus Wrong in the NYT”; “You Don’t Have to Save When Your House Does it For You”, etc.)