Elizabeth Warren Freak Out, 1: So-called “Ideologue”

Joe Weisenthal asks the question: “What Is It About Elizabeth Warren That Makes People Freak Out?”

We made sure to get Elizabeth Warren to write and present the chapter on consumer finance for our Make Markets Be Markets conference we held at the Roosevelt Institute, and spending the year doing follow up on that report got me to see some of the reasons why there are freak outs. Luckily they are all selling points to me, and should be to you as well. Two posts on this, first is about her being an “ideologue”:

“Ideologue”

If you are a political scientist, sociologist, or study a social science that isn’t economics you’ll get this point easily: Warren is considered an “ideologue” because she doesn’t assume neoclassical economic ideology is right about everything all the time. She thinks that there are great points in economic theory and does economic analysis but doesn’t follow it off the cliff.

Consider this blog post Warren did for Credit Slips in 2006:

I was teaching Carnival Cruise Lines to my first-year contract students. This is the Supreme Court opinion holding that a forum selection clause in the fine print on the back of a cruise line ticket binds a customer who bought the ticket near her home in Washington state and was injured on the cruise to travel to Flordia to sue. As we discussed the opinion, a student explained that the clause is good for everyone (except the woman who was injured) because, quoting the Court, “passengers who purchase tickets containing a forum clause like that at issue in this case benefit in the form of reduced fares reflecting the savings that the cruise line enjoys.”

Is this a question of fact or of law? “Fact, of course,” said the students. So I asked how this fact could be proven. What followed was a wonderful, multi-student discussion of maginal pricing, elasticity of demand, etc. Even as I pressed on the presumptions underlying the deductive model–fully informed parties, competitive markets, low transactions costs, etc–the students hung on to their model. They were smart and sophisticated in their arguments, but the bottom line was that they “proved” the fact of lower costs deductively by appling what they saw as immutable economic principles.

When I pointed out that this lovely conversation was all about theory and not fact, they were resistant. So I reversed and asked what the plaintiff might offer as proof to show that the justice was wrong. Much silence followed.

I finally filled in the blanks, suggesting some empirical tests–ticket prices for companies that do/don’t use such clauses, changes in pricing before/after such clauses are used, evaulation of whether cost is large enough to be reflected in price, etc. They got the idea and had some good suggestions

What struck me, and the reason I bring it to this group, is how these very bright students seemed to believe that deductive logic produced a “fact” that they could not or would not challenge. Perhaps my class was abberational, but it made me wonder about how we are educating our students, both before and during law school. Is it all about deduction, with nothing left over for reality?

I see that resistance a lot among certain types of elites. Modern economics “proves” that whatever exists must be the best. If you ask questions, or ask how do you really know outside of some math derived from 1870s physics or 1950s electrical engineering, everyone just blinks.

Bob Lawless wrote up Warren’s approach here:

For those who want to understand Warren’s approach to regulatory issues, one article in particular stands out for me: “Bankruptcy Policy,” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 54, pp. 775-814 (1987). The article is illustrative of a pragmatic approach to very difficult policy issues. In the article, Warren embraces economic analysis–what might be called a “market-based” approach by some commentators today–but as a tool to broaden inquiry, not to close it off