Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Onions

People, VV Chari has 'em!

Check out his recent testimony at the sausage factory.

Here's the punch line:

"I would argue that the United States devotes shamefully little to economic research. For example, the NSF's budget for economics is a pitiful $27 million out of which $2.6 million goes to the worthwhile activity of supporting the Panel Study on Income Dynamics.

Twenty five million dollars for an activity that is deemed fundamentally important by the people of the United States?

Out of that 25 million dollars, my best estimate is that only about 10 per cent goes to macroeconomics. Compare $2.5 million to an overall NSF budget of $6 billion or to the federal government support of basic research of roughly $30 billion.

I should emphasize that, in my judgment, the NSF's peer review process in economics is exceptionally fair and thoughtful. Expanding resources to the NSF's economics program will surely result in much better economic research and will result in very little waste."

Wow, only 27 million "pitiful" dollars for an activity that the "people of the United States" consider to be "fundamentally important", i.e. DSGE modeling!

The horror!

People, he's basically using the crisis to argue in favor of more summer money!

If you look up onions in the dictionary, all that should be there is this:



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And just like a proper government economist, his numbers are all over the map. In the quote alone econ research gets $27M, $20M and $25M. Okay, cheap, but couldn't resist, sorry.

Mike

Angus said...

Hi, sorry, the $20M was a typo by me. I fixed it in the post now.

thanks for your comment.

Les Cargill said...

Well... there might also be this. I dunno.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2Z0juP-ag