If Only We Listened to Economists.

• Author: Batkins, Sam

When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers By Simon W. Bowmakei 673 pp.; MIT Press, 2019

Despite Harry Truman's crack about the need for a one-handed economist, well-trained economists who advise politicians usually share agreement on many principles. Unfortunately for those who work for politicians, their work often requires them to cobble together and support policies at odds with those principles.

In When the President Calls, New York University economist Simon Bowmaker interviews several economists from the Nixon administration to the Trump administration who have been put in that position. The book gives readers a sense of the advisers' individual personalities and the substantive economic input they provided to the president.

The book offers little-known anecdotes and White House gossip that provide plenty of humor. For example, the late Paul O'Neill, who was treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration, said this about the president he served:

I honestly have no clue how Bush 43 thought about economics. My meetings with him were absolutely unmemorable.... He can't be very proud of what he did. Concerning the priorities of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, O'Neill said, "It was about winning votes and winning elections. Doing the right thing was more an afterthought."

Bowmaker spends considerable time on each administration's crises and how each policymaker provided substantive input to the president. But the gossip is a nice bonus.

Ties that bind / The first question Bowmaker asks each economic adviser is why he or she got into economics. Despite the partisan and ideological diversity of the group, they are generally free traders, recognize there is no such thing as a free lunch, understand incentives and tradeoffs, and recognize the importance of benefit-cost analysis. There are several unifying traits among the group, as economics is their common "religion" in many respects, not politics.

The book includes plenty of economic giants: Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Joseph Stiglitz, Greg Mankiw, Glenn Hubbard, and John B. Taylor, among others. Greenspan was hardly shy in describing his experiences with different presidents. When naming the two "sharpest," Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon were his choices. Apparently, Clinton would read three or four books a week as president. Greenspan remarked, "It is an extraordinary intelligence. How he ended up as a politician I do not know, but he is very...