Left and Right Alike Are Blind to Trade-Offs

Economics is stingy about offering up free lunches. Yet politicians on both left and right love to try to serve them.

- Jason Furman

The liberal vice is thinking that all good things go together. Every progressive goal will simultaneously boost economic growth and create jobs. Any carbon tax increase devastates the economy.

The conservative vice is arguing that costs are so catastrophically large that other policy goals don’t merit consideration. Any Covid social-distancing measure killed jobs. Any carbon tax increase destroys growth. Any regulation devastates the economy.

Sufferers from the liberal vice get the signs wrong about trade-offs. They think raising the minimum wage increases employment without job loss.

Each vice leads to a failure to take trade-offs seriously. Liberals do benefit-only analysis in which everything passes because all good things go together. Conservatives do cost-only analysis in which everything fails because economic effects dwarf all other considerations. In both cases, economic analysis becomes propaganda for predetermined conclusions rather than a tool for making difficult choices.