from Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly:
It is not merely a matter of “who gets listened to” but why they get listened to. Recall in this connection the peculiar comment of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in December of 2011 as he scrambled to get the Obama administration off the hook for its tepid response to the slump: “There was not a single mainstream, Wall Street, academic economist who knew at the time, in January of 2009, just how deep the economic hole was that we were in.”
Of course there were plenty of economists who knew how bad things were. That one was easy to call. But if you limited your inquiries—as Carney is confessing the administration did—to the statements of economists who are “mainstream” and “Wall Street” you would not have encountered such economists. You would have been counting on the wisdom of people who had been “wrong about everything,” as Dean Baker puts it.
On the other hand, you would also have been listening to the greatest names of professional economics. And this, we know, is in keeping with President Obama’s deepest instincts: trust the experts.
Preferably ones who haven’t earned scare quotes.