In A Word - No

One of Greg’s students inquires about Noam Scheiber’s retort that “all the cleverness has crowded out some of the truly deep questions we rely on economists to answer” There are many reasons to defend Steven Levitt but I’ll focus on just one – his work is vitally important.

I spend most of my days thinking about taxes, and government spending and public policy, issues well with in the schema of traditional big economics. My hope is that one day I’ll have a clever new idea, or perhaps as importantly, a clever way of explaining an old one that will help us and our children live happier, healthier, more productive lives.

Steven Levitt spends his days thinking about the roots of crime, corruption, and the racial divide. If he can help us understand those issues he will do more for economic prosperity than I ever could.

Creating the right incentives for corporations to locate here in the US is important, but getting young urban kids out street gangs and into college is much more important. Tax policy works at the fringes of the free market economy, corruption goes right to the heart of why some economies succeed and others fail.

In 2004 the median black man earned only 75% of the median white male. That gap is virtually eliminated when accounting for 8th grade test scores. A cure for the test score gap could mean a GDP boost of nearly 3% based on earnings alone.

These questions are big questions.

Perhaps, the deeper question is whether we have to take ourselves seriously to do serious work. Do we have to talk about boring issues in a boring way? Or, can we address the things that that everyday people care about? Does being a uncommonly productive scholar mean being divorced from common things?