A senior White House adviser attacked the economic analysis of a top Obama official, extending an unusually bitter and public feud between economists.
“Jason Furman has gone after [Trump’s] Council of Economic Advisers since we started, and he’s always wrong,” said Tomas Philipson, acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “And this was another example when he was wrong again,” Philipson told the Washington Examiner.
The controversy started when the Council of Economic Advisers posted a coronavirus death chart to its Twitter account in early May. Jason Furman, a chairman of the council under President Barack Obama, called the chart “utterly superficial and misleading” and furthermore said the chart might represent “the lowest point in the 74 year history” of the council.
Furman and a number of other economists alleged that the chart was an overly optimistic forecast of projected coronavirus deaths and was an unethical attempt by the Trump administration to create a false sense of hope as it pushed to reopen the economy in early May.
Philipson pushed back, saying that Furman and others “misconstrued” the CEA chart and that the debate over it was “just kind of election year silliness.”
“We did not provide a prediction of the future — of the disease. We just described the data of what has happened with a particular type of methodology,” Philipson said. “I think people were just confused, but they try to make up big political stories,” he added.
The CEA’s coronavirus chart used a “cubic model,” which simply draws an approximate curve to fit a set of data. The model is not a sophisticated prediction tool, and the CEA cubic fit line showed the deaths from coronavirus dropping to zero by the middle of May, which obviously did not occur. Philipson clarified that the chart was not meant to predict the number of coronavirus deaths but instead was merely showing a visualization of a simple mathematical formula created in an Excel spreadsheet.
The controversy is over the perception that the chart was a projection of coronavirus deaths. The White House claims it was not a projection while many prominent economists on Twitter, including Furman, said that it does indeed look like a forecast and that many in the White House saw it that way too. Some reports, too, suggested that White House officials have relied on the chart, among other CEA models, in decision-making and have interpreted it as “predicting that the daily death count would peak in mid-April before dropping off substantially” and that overall, there would be fewer deaths than initially expected.
Philipson said that the media, and the Washington Post particularly, “misreported everything because they had a political spin on it. I think that they’re fully aware of what they’re doing. It’s just a bunch of noise that doesn’t really matter in some sense.”
Multiple economists, including Austan Goolsbee, a former colleague of Philipson’s at the University of Chicago, agreed with Furman’s analysis on Twitter and said the chart was evidence of the Trump administration not taking the economic or health risks of the coronavirus seriously enough.
“Tom. I’m your former colleague and your friend. Take a step back,” Goolsbee tweeted. “Your anger is not about other people. It’s coming from President Trump putting you in an embarrassing situation.”
Philipson went even further in his strike on Furman, saying that he and another Obama adviser, Larry Summers, were also wrong in their critique of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Philipson said the tax cuts ended up exactly as the Trump administration had analyzed and expected.
“It’s just that they’ve been wrong. At every turn, they’ve been wrong. And this is just another example,” said Philipson.
