Suppose you're the president's economic

Suppose you're the president's economic advisor, and you disagree with him?

Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard, a member of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) from 1997 to 1999, has given this a lot of thought. You can find these thoughts in this draft of an article for Challenge magazine, "What Can an Economic Adviser Do When He Disagrees with the President?"

Members of the CEA operate under constraints other administration economic figures don't. These are academics, serving on the CEA for a short period of time, and heading back to live the rest of their lives in the university community. They have to behave themselves on the CEA. They can't say incredible or politically opportunistic things and go back to a successful academic career. The system is meant to give the president honest professional advice.

But the president won't always take that advice. For one thing,

"...any president has to weigh in many factors besides what economic theory says, including many political factors. That is their job, in a democracy. In my view, a system in which the CEA gives advice that is a few steps farther removed from political reality than the rest of the White House, and in which the president then does something different from that advice because he sees a larger picture, is a system in which everybody is doing his or her job properly..."

So what's a CEA member to do when the president chooses actions that he can't, professionally, agree with? Frankel looks at the history of the CEA since the Johnson Administration, looking at different strategies. One piece of advice, choose your words carefully:

"Mankiw [Bush's current CEA chair - Ben] has one major factor working in his favor: in these situations, the press and Congress seldom ask persistent or sophisticated questions. Or, if they do ask these questions, the answers don't get reported to the public. So one can usually formulate a careful sentence that appears to be consistent with the White House line and yet is not literally false, and get away with it. His immediate predecessor, Glenn Hubbard, did well with this strategy, which helped him win a powerful role as an administration insider. He signed on to the language that "long-term interest rates do not move in lockstep with actual or expected federal budget deficits." He, like Mankiw, has a textbook with the standard model linking interest rates to budget deficit. But because the sentence is true as written, under this strategy Hubbard has little to fear from his colleagues when he returns to university life. The press either lacked the opportunity or lacked the perspicacity -- I don't know which -- to ask the obvious follow-up questions. ("OK, we understand that budget deficits are not the only factor that determine interest rates. But, in your view, doesn't a budget deficit cause real interest rates to be higher than they otherwise would be? And regardless whether that increase is small, isn't it still true that the deficit crowds out investment?") Perhaps the press is giving this Bush an easier ride than his predecessors due to the post-September-11 national mood. Perhaps the press perceives correctly that its readership lacks the attention span or interest in policy details necessary to read complicated stories. In any case, the hard questions have not yet been asked. So Mankiw's best bet is probably this same strategy. If he can get away with it."

Brad DeLong recently had similar advice for the Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.

Frankel points out that the constraint on CEA members - they want to avoid saying something incredible so that they can go back to academics, gives the public some nice leverage:

"But the public, Congress, and the media should ?do their jobs properly? as well. This includes putting members of the Council of Economic Advisers on the spot, when White House policy appears to deviate from good economics."