Exactly that he doesn’t have citations! From Daily Signal:
President Donald Trump was right to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, for these mistakes, even if they were the result of systemic flaws, not partisanship. Antoni, whom Trump nominated as her replacement on Monday, can restore integrity and precision to our most critical economic data agency.
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Critics claim Antoni is under-credentialed for the position. For instance, a Wednesday Wall Street Journal article unfavorably pointed out the number of academic citations Antoni has received compared to McEntarfer. Yet there’s literally no one outside the ivory tower of academia who cares about citation numbers.
The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder—not because of a lack of skill or scholarship, but because universities, especially in the social sciences, overwhelmingly deny tenure to right-leaning scholars. It’s a vicious cycle: Conservatives are shut out of faculty jobs, which in turn means they don’t accumulate the “elite” university credentials their detractors demand.
If you only measure merit by the yardstick of academia’s ideological monoculture, you’ll always find conservatives “underqualified.”
Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world, where Antoni has dominated, quickly rising through the ranks to lead one of the country’s top institutions, The Heritage Foundation. Antoni’s applied policy work—outside the cloistered, naval-gazing academy—is exactly the kind of real-world credentials this job needs.
I laughed and laughed at this point. The point is not that he doesn’t have citations. In my time in government I met many extremely knowledgeable individuals w/o a single peer-reviewed journal article. The point is he has neither academic nor statistical agency experience.
One will note that the article does not rebut a single example of Dr. Antoni’s statistical errors (recounted in this WaPo article).
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Bureau of Labor Statistics data is ‘phony’
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Social safety net programs are ‘Ponzi schemes’
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Tariffs impact the import price index
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Monthly jobs report should be paused
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The Federal Reserve should be removed
Oh, and i think the three members of the Council of Economic Advisers are … PhD economists.
To recap other errors:
EJ Antoni/Heritage: “Back from the Brink: Trump’s Economy Soars Instead of Crashing”
The Great Replacement “Theory” * Comes to Economics at Heritage
EJ Antoni Redefines Recession as What the American People Feel
EJ Antoni Worries about the Gap between CES NFP and CPS Employment
Son of ShadowStats: “Government economic figures hide the truth about the economy”
Did Government Employment Account for Most of September’s Employment Gains?
Lessons in Why We Don’t Judge Recessions on the Basis of GDP
The Great Replacement “Theory” * Comes to Economics at Heritage
“we never left the recession of March 2020 and … everything has been getting gradually worse”
“Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world…”
Necessitated by the fact that facts have a liberal bias. Antoni rose to the top of the right-wing think ta k worldbecause he has so little concern for facts.
The whole thing is a little-Antoni-quality defense of little Antoni.
I can’t help myself.
The author, Alfredo Ortiz, has regurgitated the familiar right-wing claim that elite universities discriminate against right-wing scholars. The “we have our own facts” bunch apparently has a new champion. I happen to agree that the best universities don’t hire many right-wingers, and for good reason. Today’s right-wingers generally have such low intellectual standards that they shouldn’t be allowed near curious young minds.
The University of Göttingen is generally recognized to be the first research university:
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university
It was founded in 1734 with the goal of bringing the best scholarship and teaching together. One of Göttingen’s early students was Friedrich Wilhelm von Humboldt, an educational reformer who founded the University of Berlin more or less on the model of Göttingen. Prussia then set up other universities copying Berlin’s. Those universities became engines of discovery in an era when German science dominated advancement in physics and chemistry.
The first U.S. university to explicitly adopt the Göttingen/Humbolt research university model was Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876. Other already-existing universities where research on a more casual basis was already common quickly followed Hopkins’ example. Those universities – Harvard, Penn, Columbia, Yale – have been among the most respected research institutions in the world.
This is the tradition which Mr. Ortiz thinks needs to be remedied. He offers the same whiny “they’re mean to me” grievance that is the hallmark of most right-wing political rhetoric these days. Not an original word in his whole diatribe, thus demonstrating my point about the low quality of right-wing thought. The standard of enquiry at real research institutions requires allowing facts to speak, to lead to reasonable conclusions. The right objects to that standard, preferring to deny inconvenient facts in service of an agenda, and then whines that they’re held back for falling short of the intellectual honesty that has built our modern world. Boo hoo.
Notice that several of the original U.S. research universities are under attack now from the right. Note also that Mr. Ortiz draws his pay from a right-wing advocacy group; same mold as little Antoni, just less successful.
It has been a long time since we heard from Hamilton on the oil supply and demand outlook. I still remember his famous “hundred dollars here to stay” blog post (and econ paper) from summer of 2014. FWIW, current price is $62.61 (WTI, prompt month on the futures curve, as I type this.) So…well under a hundred.
It’s not just a “walk of shame” or “calling someone out” thing. But I think it is very common on the Internet and for opinion commentators to reduce their amount of discussion of areas where the real world is moving contrary to their predictions (or even preferences). So, I think Jim’s lack of posting about oil supply and oil prices is…interesting.
And given how commonly Menzie calls out errors by others. Correctly, I might add. And even elevating them to full posts of his, calling out commenters from threads…I think me calling out Jim is reasonable. Or at least “goose for the gander”. And on topic, given the vast amount of “digital ink” this blog gave peak oil (or peak oil “lite”) arguments in the past. Not just me being hard on a kind old gentleman.
And for all those who say this is in the rear view mirror and ancient history…well Jim’s article was really about the medium term outlook. He wasn’t predicting next year, but next several years. It’s actually necessary to wait some period of time to judge the article.
Hooting in JAN2015 could be a gotcha. And as prices crashed in late 2014, Jim was in resistance/denial saying things to the effect of producers selling oil for less than its worth. Kind of strange for an economist to talk like that. About an…um…market price.
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2014/11/a-glut-of-oil
But…OK, I can understand not changing priors based on a short price crash in late 2014. But 11 years later? No. That starts to be a fair judgment time. And many economic arguments (e.g. the “CAPM rate of return has changed” arguments from the 90s) require an even longer time frame to judge them (or some kind of parallel Earth generator, where we can get a canonical ensemble of trial runs, for fair statistics!)
Also, his article was a strongly peak oil tinged article (read the whole thing), including the US state by state peaking arguments. Also, see his dismission of shale…already a growth phenomenon and one that at least he should have given more uncertainty to. So, I think it’s important to revisit Jim’s article.
And it wasn’t just that article…he had very many others in a similar vein. It was a whole thing here, for many years. Can even reach back to the 2007 article taking Staniford’s Ghawar watering out arguments seriously:
“If you end up being surprised by the big story of the next decade, you can’t say, “nobody told us.” Instead you’ll have to say, “we didn’t listen.””
Umm…well, you told us, but maybe we shouldn’t have bothered listening. 😉 The story of the “next decade” was shale, not some kind of Twilight in the Desert, Saudi supply crash concerns. (SA is still going strong and pumping more volume now than it did in 2007. And we are almost two decades from that article.)
FWIW, I also think Jim, in summer 2014, under considered, the OPEC cartel phenomenon, within his 2014 paper. The cartel may have been a major factor in the high prices from 2010-2014. Fereidun Fesharaki–not some oracle (nobody is), but a smart guy, in the industry, has a Ph.D.–at least a guy worth hearing from, said he thought the Saudis manipulated prices to the hundred level during that time frame. But I admit that this impression of OPEC is more my Bayesian gut feel. But…even if I’m betting Bayesian wrong…I think Jim under considered the issue of the cartel, within his uncertainty envelope (not just a short fig leaf of a caveat, but really considering the possibility that SA acted as a price maker, not taker…there is a HUGE amount of oil in “The Kingdom” and the costs to produce are very low, because the wells come on at 10,000 bopd…yes low even with Saudi featherbedding for local content purchasing by service companies), when considering such a peak oil oriented scenario for long term future prices, especially coming off of what was a few years of recent high prices. And yes, I know he’s sort of a historian of oil prices, but that makes it even more strange that his Spidey sense was not tingling more about the cartel (and the Saudis in particular), which had been strongly involved in several previous price gyrations.
1. Note, $62.61 is less than $50 in 2014 real dollars (adjusted using BLS CPI calculator). James never went in detail if he meant real or nominal. If he meant “real” (i.e. 2014 constant), which would seem typical for an economist, then he’s at under half of his prediction. If he meant nominal (giving him most wiggle room) than we’re still at more than a third under his prediction.
1.5. Note that at one part of the paper (dismissing the shale phenomenon), he says that shale is unlikely to return real prices to where they were a decade ago. (Kind of a much lower goal post than “hundred dollars to stay”. 🙂 OK, but still. Looking at the EIA data series and the BLS CPI (my tools, but I don’t think fancier tools would give a dramatically different story), we see that current price equates to $36.82 “a decade ago” (JUN25 back to JUN04). And the actual price, nominal of WTI was 38.03 in JUN04. (It was $38+ in JUL04 and $41 averaged for all of 04…low $30s in 2003). So…actually even with a dramatically different goalpost than “hundred to stay” (i.e. “return to real prices of a decade ago”), Jim ended up being wrong. Since…we basically…did that!
2. Jim also never specified if he meant WTI or Brent, for that last sentence conclusion about hundred her to stay. Brent is closer to a “world price” (reflects European, coastal port region prices…but prices vary around the globe with differentials of a few bucks). WTI is the most financially traded and most commonly talked about benchmark within the US. Brent is typically (and now) a few bucks higher. But even if we give him the benefit and discuss Brent, it doesn’t change the overall story of his failed prediction. To be generous, perhaps he never specified Brent or WTI, since he knew how closely correlated they were and the success or failure of his prognostication should not rest on the choice. If so, Ima use WTI since it’s easier for a USAian “civilian”. Also, FWIW, Jim uses WTI price in his Figure 7.
3. This is not just a me picking out a momentary episode of low prices to call out the article. If you look at the history of the last 11 years, crude has averaged ~$63.46 (WTI spot, nominal dollars, ,using the EIA time series at monthly granularity, from and including JUL2014-JUL2025, averaged in Excel). So…kind of the story I’m talking about now, in terms of the last decade plus of experience. We have not been living in a general “hundred dollars here to stay” regime for the last decade of nominal. And deh-funitely not in terms of 2014-era real dollars!