Experts Are at a Loss on Investing:
Nobel winners and top academics fumble the sorts of decisions Bush’s Social Security overhaul plan would ask average Americans to make.
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“I think very little about my retirement savings, because I know that thinking could make me poorer or more miserable or both,” quipped 2002 Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University.”I would rather spend my time enjoying my income than bothering about investments,” said Clive W.J. Granger, an emeritus professor at UC San Diego and a 2003 Nobel Prize winner.White House officials dismiss such remarks as largely irrelevant to the Social Security debate. They describe the president’s proposed investment accounts as voluntary and low-risk.
They suggest that those who oppose the accounts are taking a special swipe at low-income Americans, who otherwise would not have the money to invest on their own.
“It’s almost an insult to the ability of some Americans to take charge of their retirements,” Bush spokesman Trent Duffy said.
My favorite part is where the reporter mentions that White House officials describe the “overhaul” as “voluntary” and “low-risk.” Earth to White House officials, if something is voluntary it means the individual gets to choose what they do with their money. The new plan is a forced savings plan, in that the money that would have been put into “Social Security” is still taken in the form of a payroll tax and placed into one of the politically-connected funds. Taken without the free consent of the tax producer.
And regarding the other premise of the article, the Nobel prize in Economics is the only prize which consistently awards researchers with dichotomous opinions (i.e. a free-market Hayek versus socialist Myrdal). This would be akin to the physics committee awarding one researcher for their work on showing black holes exist and then awarding another researcher for calculating the non-existence of black holes.
To wit:
“Economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying opposing things.” - Roberto Alazar
Via LRC.