My parents really, really like to talk about the economy. In fact, it’s probably the current issue that they’re most long-winded about: the downturn, the bailout, the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, the stimulus. They’re representative of a larger trend: It seems that everyone really, really likes to talk about the economy lately, and everyone has an opinion. The dialogue has come to a point where abject terms are being thrown about: responsibility, greed, corruption, intervention and my favorite: Wall Street versus Main Street.

The question I have for my parents, and for everyone, is this: how much do we, on Main Street, know about Wall Street? For that matter, what right do we have to our opinions on how Wall Street saves itself?

It’s natural to care about something when it affects you directly. If you’re about to lose your job, you find something to get angry at. In this case, our favorite scapegoats are often greedy bank executives and the subprime mortgages they offered. Sometimes our favorite scapegoat is government, and it’s easy to become angry at the prospect of a stimulus when the government is taking your hard-earned money to put into programs that you couldn’t care less about. But in any case, individual perceptions of a larger market situation are, quite frequently, dependent on individual situations. For the most part, we hold the opinions we hold about economic policy with an ineradicable bias that stems from our own places in society.

Why is this? Well, for one, it’s not even rational for us to know anything about current macroeconomic policy. Why spend time learning about what the actions of the Federal Reserve have to do with anything when we could devote that time to improving our own situations? Why care when it’s admittedly not all that interesting? We can’t blame people for having strong opinions about the economy, because they’re all affected by it. Nor can we blame people for not knowing every side of the stimulus issue, because their time is simply not worth the cost of educating themselves when they have no say in what the Fed or Congress do.

But it makes me question the whole discussion when I see the opinions in Congress begin to resemble the opinions of my parents. How many congressmen and women have a real understanding of what kind of stimulus package would work? In the end, a well-informed economic opinion—without a significant amount of education—comes down to which policy czar you choose to follow. And this, in itself, is a choice that is often made arbitrarily, because let’s admit it: economics isn’t all that interesting for most, and it’s pretty complicated.

We elect people to represent us in government because we believe them to be the most skilled rulers, better at judging what’s best for our society than we are, or aligning their opinions about what’s best for society with our own. When we look for a representative, we don’t look for an economist. Right now, it seems as though policy is getting thrown off by politics, and I cannot help but think that Congress right now, like my parents’ dinner table, is just another gathering of non-experts with strong opinions.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Forum, Staff Columnists. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.