Economic Advice and Political Decisions: A Clash of Civilizations?

George Stigler, the Nobel prize winner in economics in 1982, once wrote that economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live. It’s not a proposition that Don Patinkin, who trained several generations of “Patinkin boys” and had quite an influence on practical economics in Israel, would likely have felt comfortable with. And many people in this room, I suspect, would take Patinkin’s side in this virtual debate between these two giants of our profession. Today, I want to examine the virtual debate between Patinkin and Stigler from two rather different perspectives.