This is cool

The Man(kiw) has done it again. In another awesome post about the effects of the "stimulus" bill on employment, Mankiw discusses an absurd press release from an administration official. The administration official reads like a moron. Then, Mankiw takes on the role of asking the questions to the administration official, and he asks a far more relevant quesiton.

"Going forward, what macroeconomic data would you have to observe before you concluded that the stimulus bill has been a failure? Or will you conclude, no matter how bad things get, that the economy would have been in even worse shape without the stimulus? And if the latter is the case, aren't these quarterly reports just a bit surreal?"

This question is awesome on many levels. First, all the "objectivity" surrounding the performance analysis of the "stimulus" bill is a mirage. You cannot possibly measure the "saving or creating" of jobs, so you cannot possibly tell if the "stimulus" bill helped in that goal. Second, as Mankiw points out, you cannot randomly stimulate part of the economy (while controling the rest of it) to test if the stimulus worked compared to the control group. If, in the future, some government hack says that the economy is better off than it would have been without the "stimulus", you can confidently disregard that person as someone who doesn't have the slightest idea of what they're talking about. Why? Becuase there is no way of telling how the economy would have fared without the stimulus, now that it has been passed.

Professor, as always, you are the Man(kiw)*.

*Greg Mankiw is so much better a man crush than Deron Williams.