She raises an issue of licensing. I have a few and they vary from one extreme to another. I have been through the professional side and I also had to get a Pesticide License in New Jersey, just to handle my genetically modified plants. That was an interesting exam but alas a tale for another day. I even have an FCC radio license, and yes it did take some reviewing. Come to think of it there are medical licenses, car licenses, gun licenses, no I do not have a gun but New Jersey requires them if you ever bring a BB rifle through the state so just in case got that one too. Never got a Professional Engineer license however, it required learning stuff that I would never use, like surveying, advanced bridge design, strength of materials, and the like.
I remember taking the PhD qualifying exam when I spent a year at Northwestern. They asked questions about transmission lines, vacuum tubes, and dc motors. I went back to MIT, and never looked back to Illinois.
But back to Woolley and her argument. She argues, possibly somewhat tongue in cheek:
First, licensing might serve the public interest. In order to obtain a license, an individual must demonstrate competence in his or her field. In order to keep and maintain their licence, an individual must continue to act competently and ethically. Hence licensing guarantees consumers some basic level of competence and integrity.
Second, licensing might increase wages. Kleiner and Krueger (2008) estimate that, all else being equal, licensing increases wages by 15 percent, about the same as unionization. A licensing body can increase wages either by restricting the supply of licensed professionals, or by setting price guidelines, say, $85 for a dental examination.
Third, the process of licensing might provide opportunities for rent-seeking. For example, if economics bloggers were licensed, then license fee revenue could be used to fund honoraria for directors of the Canadian College of Economics Bloggers or jobs for Economics Blog Inspectors.
The first issue may have some merit. In medicine we really do not want incompetents operating on someone's brain. In fact we do not want someone even diagnosing a disease unless they have been educated and demonstrated proficiency. Same for the engineer and bridges. But alas these two science based professions demonstrate consequences, and a generally agreed to and provable base of knowledge. Yes Medicine is still part art, but today we have a lot of science in it as well. Even Law has an defined and agreed to body of knowledge. Thus the Bar exams test that agreed to set of knowledge and of process.
However economics lacks almost any of the qualities of the above. There is Keynes, there Hayek, there is well a whole mass of schools and believers. Probably more than there are religions in the world. Which is true, they fight amongst each other calling each other names, specifically those down here in the States, and in addition they seem never to get things right. I think of Ms. Romer and her infamous document of January 11, 2009 where she predicted the results of the Stimulus to the month. Did not happen! My guesses were better.
Thus how can one conceive of a license to such a group if the core beliefs are so disparate.
The second concern is that given the lack of structure in economics, namely core beliefs, I really discount all the math as want to be engineers who want to be mathematicians type of stuff, I went through part of that phase when I started out so I know, the core beliefs are so disparate.
My third point is a bit more serious. Namely by creating some license for an area of study which is still in its infancy it may create a chilling effect on those who may desire to comment and contribute. Would the license be such that any commentary would be controlled similarly to that of a physician who is diagnosing a patient. In this case the patient is the economy in large and thus putatively any comment on the economy would be diagnosing a patient, namely the economy, and thus may be allowed only to those who are licensed.
Fourth, as any medical student knows in their fourth year, what they have learned will most likely be invalidated by the time they are at the peak of their profession, so expect the change. Yet as the students know for their licensing exams they must recite back what the standard is at the time at which they take the exam! Namely licensing exams reflect what the assembly of minds believe at a specific point in time, and God forbid you have a different insight, do not exhibit that in the exam, recite what has been agreed to mantra. In medicine that may get worse as the new health laws require the following not of the professional wisdom but of the Governments CME directives. So as a summary of the fourth observation, licensing means compliance with the past. Economics just does not work that way.
She continues:
The other way of establishing competence is through examinations, such as law societies' bar exams, or the chartered accounting profession's uniform final exam.
Done well, accreditation could raise the quality of economic debate. How many times have you read a newspaper, or turned on the TV, and heard someone claiming to be an economist who demonstrated absolutely no knowledge of basic economic principles? Accreditation could - perhaps - flush out these charlatans.
Done poorly, accreditation could institutionalize a rigid orthodoxy, a particular approach to the economics discipline.
Economics as a profession, or more importantly as a field of study, needs many commentators and providers of insight. There has been no Newton to establish ground rules, there still is a cacophony of voices all with opinions. Woolley raises many interesting points and is a well deserved discussion.
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