W fired Erika McEntarfer, America's labour statistician, he achieved something supposedly rare: he got economists to unite. In a survey by the University of Chicago's Clark Centre for Global Markets, 100% of the discipline's most prominent practitioners agreed that there was no evidence the Bureau of Labour Statistics () was biased.
Over history, economists have disagreed a lot. The 18th century saw classical types spar with mercantilists; the mid-20th pitted Keynesians against monetarists. More recent decades have set champions of rational expectations and efficient markets against behavioralists. Sometimes disputes remain cloistered in academia; often they spill into the public square, in arguments over minimum wages, debt sustainability and monetary-policy rules.
George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that if all economists were laid end to end, they still would not reach a conclusion. Winston Churchill suggested that, if you wanted two opinions on a matter, you should put two economists in a room. The Trump era, however, has ushered in seemingly unprecedented unity. Each new White House directive invites the collective ire of a profession famous for its fissiparousness.
Since 2011 the Clark Centre has polled economists on topical issues such as cryptocurrencies, fracking and inequality. Some questions, such as that about the survey, might seem straightfoward; others are trickier. Recent surveys have asked about the effectiveness of sanctions on Russia, if foreign aid can raise growth and whether climate change threatens financial stability. And although Mr Trump has inspired consensus on a number of issues, even before his arrival economists were more united than their caricature suggests. On over a quarter of questions, respondents who register an opinion in one direction lean the same way as the others; on most, more than nine in ten are like-minded.
In almost every question on trade policy -- be it about or whether commerce with China has left Americans better off -- economists defend free trade. None of them agrees with the statement that "higher import duties...to encourage producers to make [in America]...would be a good idea"; only a handful think such tools can even substantially affect the trade deficit. Taxes are another hot-button issue that elicit less controversy than might be expected. Pigouvian taxes are popular; Laffer curves are not. Few economists thought that extending tax cuts from Mr Trump's first term would meaningfully boost ; most agree that restoring the top marginal rate to 39.6% would not impede growth.
The list of agreed-upon statements does often read like a catalogue of presidential rebukes: vaccine refusal imposes externalities; politicising monetary policy is folly; sovereign-wealth funds and strategic crypto reserves serve little purpose; bans on high-skilled immigration would sap America's research-and-development leadership, push businesses abroad, hurt average workers and do little to boost employment.
A Trump supporter might survey this scene and reach an obvious conclusion: that economics is less a science than a guild dominated by conformist elites. But although many economists have an instinctive dislike of the president, such a charge cannot explain why the panel is equally sceptical of traditionally left-wing policies, like interest-rate caps and rent control, as of right-wing policies, like self-financing tax cuts. Or why experts are as likely to agree that "rising inequality is straining the health of liberal democracy" as they are to disagree with Thomas Piketty's claim that the blame for this lies with the fact that returns on capital are rising faster than economic growth. There is, to be sure, shared respect for free markets, but one that is nuanced enough to accommodate support for bank bail-outs and congestion pricing.
That is why the disagreements revealed by the Clark Centre's survey are more telling than the consensus. Antitrust is one fault line. Economists are split on whether American airline mergers should have been approved, whether big tech platforms ought to be broken up and whether artificial-intelligence firms merit scrutiny. Financial regulation is another. Economists broadly agree that oversight is required, including of the non-bank intermediaries that now make up much of the financial system. But ask what optimal regulation would look like and dissent quickly emerges. Would Americans be better off if the size of banks was capped at 4% of the industry's assets? Should America increase the deposit insurance available to customers? On these questions, no more than 60% of experts populate a side.
What do antitrust and regulation share that tariffs and migration do not? Part of the answer concerns the nature of the trade-offs. Antitrust weighs the costs of market power against efficiencies of scale; financial regulation pits stability against growth. By contrast, the net effects of free trade or high-skilled immigration are clearer. On trade and migration there are reams of evidence across countries and decades. Antitrust cases and financial crises are rare, idiosyncratic and hard to generalise about. Thus it is easier to gauge the effects of a tariff than to know what would have happened had a bank run been allowed to proceed. Economists, in the end, can be only as confident as the data let them be.
This leads to the last category of interest from the Clark Centre's polls: those questions on which economists report great uncertainty. If there is a common thread here, it is novelty. Will lead to larger increases in per person than did the internet? Will stablecoins account for a substantial share of payment flows in ten years' time? Does the growth of private credit raise systemic financial risk? Economists may be willing to take on the president; they are less willing to take a punt on the future. ■
