Greg Mankiw Stoops To A New Low As A Member Of Team Republican

Greg Mankiw was hired by George Bush and now by Mitt Romney for a good reason. He is a very smart guy who is willing to use his brains and his position at Harvard to play on the republican team. Most of the time he is more subtle. This post shows that he has lost his touch. He commits one of the most common abuses of statistics. He chose the dates on a graph to show how the employment to population ratio decreased in the Obama administration. If he had started the graph earlier, when Bush was in charge of the economy, it would have shown that the ratio dropped more under Bush than it did under Obama. Frankly, I did not expect that Mankiw, whose textbooks are among the highest selling economics texts in the US, would jeopardize his reputation by stooping so low. The war over the control of the US government has produced another casualty. Who will believe economists when their politics are place above the requirement for professional ethics and respect for truth telling?