The Political Economy of Incompetence

How Hannah Arendt predicted Stephen Moore

On August 1 Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report, claiming — without a shred of evidence — that the numbers had been rigged to damage him politically. On Thursday he held a White House briefing, together with economist Stephen Moore, in an attempt to convince the media and the public that the economy is actually doing great. The photo above is a scene from that briefing.

What’s wrong with this picture?

First, look at the chart. The second line claims that it shows “medium income” — a term unknown to economics. Clearly it was supposed to say median income.

OK, speling misteaks hapen. But not, usually, in charts prepared for a presentation by the President of the United States.

Beyond that, Jared Bernstein, who has looked at the data Moore presented in that chart and others, says that the numbers appear to be all wrong. Which is no surprise given the source.

For the big problem with the picture above isn’t the embarrassing misspelling of “median,” or even the factual errors. It’s the fact that Trump gave a presentation about the state of the economy along with Stephen Moore — who may be the last person on the planet you’d trust to tell you the economic truth.

I don’t mean that Moore is extremely right-wing, although of course he is. I don’t even mean that he’s a dishonest hack, although again of course he is. I mean that even among dishonest right-wing hacks Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right.

And the fact that Moore was the right’s go-to guy on economics even before Trump tells you a lot about the people who now rule America.

Before I get there: Some readers may think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that Moore’s problem with facts is pathological. But read this report from the Columbia Journalism Review:

You see, the Kansas City Star had reprinted a Moore column, originally written for Investors Business Daily, that cited a bunch of employment statistics as part of an attack on, well, me. One of the paper’s regular columnists happened to notice that some of Moore’s numbers looked wrong; when she checked them out it turned out that all of his numbers were wrong, in many cases bafflingly so.

Incidentally, Moore cited these bad numbers to support the “Kansas experiment,” then-governor Sam Brownback’s attempt to create an economic miracle by cutting taxes. The experiment was a disastrous failure:

Moore’s jobs debacle wasn’t an isolated incident. For example, in 2015 he published an op-ed attacking Obamacare in which not a single alleged fact was true. I’m not going to waste my time going through Moore’s collected writings, but it seems safe to assume that his bizarre inability to get any facts right, culminating in Thursday’s Oval Office debacle, has been consistent.

What’s Moore’s problem? I don’t know and I don’t care. The interesting question is why someone so incompetent — apparently he can’t even copy numbers correctly — has consistently failed upward. Trump even tried to put him on the Federal Reserve Board in 2019, and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t also turned out to be a grotesque misogynist and a deadbeat dad who had been held in contempt for failure to pay child support.

Looking at the trajectory of Moore’s career, it’s hard to escape the impression that the political movement with which he is aligned — MAGA at this point, but his rise predates Trump — sees his surreal incompetence not as a liability but as an asset. After all, you never know when a competent economist, especially one with a good professional reputation, might balk at being asked to say ridiculous things.

I speculated about this briefly some years ago, but thought it was an original insight — and worried whether I myself was over the top. But it turns out that it was all in Hannah Arendt. In her classic book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she explained why totalitarians — I know, Trump isn’t a full-on dictator, yet, but he’s clearly a wannabe — promote the incompetent:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Arendt also explained, in advance, the Trump administration’s extraordinary hostility to research, the extraordinary speed with which it is destroying America’s scientific base:

The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life.

Which brings me back to that Trump/Moore event. Why am I spending time on a farcical show that surely did nothing to help Trump’s cratering polling on the economy?

Source: G. Elliott Morris

The answer is that Trump/Moore was a symptom of a deep sickness in our body politic. And I have no idea when or how we’ll recover.

PS: Now this is flattering: Last night Donald Trump called me a “Deranged BUM.” Gonna add it to my profile.

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