[DcifrThs]

[ QUOTE ]
Dcifr,

Do you enjoy being an economist. How much do you have to deal with internal/external DC politics in your job?

Also, how do you categorize your economic viewpoint?
Neoliberal? How about supply vs demand side? How much government regulation is needed/good?

Thanks a bunch.

[/ QUOTE ]

well, i was an economist from 2001-2004. longer story not important. i'll get to your Q now.

i did enjoy it. crappy pay. supplemented by poker. otherwise i couldn't have lived at 21st & F.

i wrote 2 papers. one almost published. i had to deal with politics only so much as it determined WHAT my job was.

for instance, bill clinton issued Executive order 13125 which aimed at including more asiam american & pacific islanders in govt programs. my job was to determine whether they had statistically significant less access (for one reason or another). therefore, politics determined my job.

another example was my second paper about unobserved demand for health care. would a small business subsidy increase overall health insurance coverage by more than the cost of the subsidy? well on one hand, possibly, but on the other hand, possibly not. small businesses tend to have smaller #s of employees, younger employees, lower income employees, and less educated employees (some overlap there) which all contribute to a lower probability of accepting health insurance given an offer. so possibly not. i had to model that and it was pretty cool (mostly b/c you don't observe people's take up rates when they don't get offered so goooo HECKPROB [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img])

again, politics determined my job. i didn't have to deal with it though, just do it. NIKE baby!

in terms of my viewpoint, i dont really know. nobody really asks me that since i got out of DC where i was (probably the only) registered utopian socialist.

i used to say "im socially libral, fiscally conservative, geopolitically realist, and internationally economically libral." i dont know to what extent that holds true anymore. for the most part it probably does though.

i don't remember much about supply vs. demand side since it has been a while since i had to answer that.

now, in terms of govt regulation, i think int'l trade should be liberalized (as you could have probably guessed) so in that sense it is not so good. man, i suck at this. i dn't really know enough about instances, costs & benefits & studies to have a solid opinion on this. my instinct says though that govt regulation is probably un-necessary in almost all instances by typical definitions. in terms of SEC type "regulation" it is definitely needed but probably not optimal at present.

did you have a specific sector in mind?

lemme know and please feel free to critique or ask me to go into more depth anywhere (where possible that is...or provide thoughts and i'll try to expand)

Thanks,
Barron