let's try framing the economic debate like this: (right) sovereign debt, and its accompanying spending, are a or even the basic problem; it's become untenable in greece, for example, and soon european economies will fall like dominoes for this reason. you're unlikely at this point to borrow or print your way to growth, and if you try (even with some positive effect on employment short-term, increased unemployment benefits/meeting all pension obligations(=increased demand) etc). you'll wake up with a completely unsustainable level of debt, and a calamitous world financial collapse. (left) the last thing you want at this moment is austerity; you directly reduce employment (state employees) and demand, causing further contraction. the problem is precisely that the right parties in england and us etc will lead their economies into a death spiral.
what's funny is that all the data can be smoothly incorporated into each view. did the stimulus not work because it was too small? or has the idea been refuted by its trillion-dollar tryout and with it another disastrous debt balloon? honestly, who knows? or what information would count? one thing i do know: everybody's position depends not on information, but on whether they were leftists or rightists to begin with. that all the pre-slump rightists hold one opinion on what the data now show, and all the pre-slump leftists the other, demonstrates that no one's position is responsive to information. i write this watching paul krugman and steve forbes on fareed zakaria.
so let's say that, with regard to the population of economists, we can predict anyone's assessment of the effects of a 2 trillion dollar stimulus in 2012 by his political affiliation circa 1999 with 90% accuracy. (i'm betting it's at least that high.) then that population is obviously impervious to any evidence bearing on the present situation. only the outliers should not be assumed to operating with a strictly non-empirical method. well, or consider the question of any given economist's diagnosis of what went wriong in the great depression, a question of some urgency at the moment because of the analogy to the current situation. what if we found that one interpretation of the data correlated with one position on (say) gay marriage, and the other with the other? at that point, it's time to find you some new economists.
