This article is about Robert Barro, who is the third most cited economist in America. He is a professor at Harvard, and he is a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Noah Smith is a young economist who cannot understand why Barro, who he believes to be very smart, wrote an op-ed in the WSJ that is nothing more than a repetition of GOP talking points. Unemployment is high because government policies encourage people to prefer leisure to work. Moreover, businesses are not investing because of high taxes and over-regulation. Apparently, he believes that businesses would invest in the face of low consumer demand if they did not have to pay high taxes and the cost of regulation. Of course, that is exactly what the Romney campaign is saying. It should not surprise Noah Smith that Robert Barro would say the same things. He has been saying stupid things since the recession began. He argued that the stimulus would not work because the fiscal multiplier was negative. He used evidence from 1943, when the US was at war, and rationing was in effect, to "prove" that budget deficits did not stimulate consumption. He also invoked Ricardian Equivalence to argue that fiscal stimulus would not work. In other words, Robert Barro is just another smart guy whose politics drive what he chooses to write about the economy. Stupid people, without prominence in the profession, would not be as useful as Barro has been.
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