Confronting Zombie Economist Tautologies

While "zombie economists" keep repeating free trade, free trade, free trade, the US is losing ground in the clean energy market to countries like Germany, which created its own market before it was cost efficient, AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff, Thea Lee, said yesterday at a Center for American Progress panel on clean energy development. "Just because it's not cost efficient today doesn't it won't be 5, 10, 20 years from now," she said.

Lee said that neoclassical economists say that if we don't make clean energy here now, we never will. Saying that this view doesn't address the economy as people live it, she added that if the US does nothing to invest in developing that market, not only will the country get left behind but the politics of doing so will become harder as the jobs issue continues to be neglected.

Panelist Leo Hindery, of InterMedia Partners and former economic and trade advisor to the Obama campaign, said that he doesn't know anyone in the business world who thinks the economy can survive another jobless recovery. Calculating the US unemployment rate the same way they do in Spain, he said that the US would have to employ 21 million of our 30 million unemployed to get down to a reasonable unemployment rate, but that this wouldn't happen in the "absence of a jobs policy."

Hindery said that it was important to "confront the 'oh gosh, that wouldn't be free trade'" crowd about creating jobs, because globally, only about 20 million jobs were going to be created in the clean energy industry before 2030, with around two-thirds of those in manufacturing. Once those 20 million jobs are taken, he said, that well won't fill again for a long time.

As to keeping a share of those jobs in the US, Lee, an economist herself, proposed further economic heresy in saying that the US needed a border adjustment to take away the cost advantage of looser pollution laws elsewhere to prevent an economic disaster at home and an environmental disaster everywhere. It's not enough, she said, to invest a lot in research and development only to "piss it out the back door" by letting all the production jobs go to other countries.

Lee said that she understood why multinational companies didn't want any constraints on their behavior when they took money from the government, but it was the government's responsibility to take a broader view and look out for its citizens. She said an attitude adjustment was necessary among the media and political elite, and particularly among negligent members of the economics profession who'd failed to see the recession coming. It isn't enough to do whatever the companies want, she said.

Joan Fitzgerald, director of the graduate program in Law, Policy, and Society at Northeastern University and author of the book, "Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development," said that there were such things as industrialists who cared about their domestic economies. In Germany. She recounted the outlines of a discussion she attended at a German engineering society meeting, where the conversation revolved around keeping high end jobs in Germany. Not because of set targets, but because of the sense that it would be good for the country.

I guess a regard like that for the national interest is considered gauche among the more zombified of US economists, but as Hindery had said earlier of the US' lack of institutions such as a national infrastructure bank, it's an embarrassing comparison.

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