Time for an Attribution Commission? March 17, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Accountability, Attribution, Economic analysis, Outcomes theory & politics, Outcomes theory & the news , trackbackA blog posting by Dean Baker (he is one of the few economists who accurately predicted the housing collapse) looks at the ‘comparative responsibility’ of Bush and Obama for the 2009 U.S. deficit in the face of some Republican claims that somehow it is Obama’s fault. He argues that most of it is the legacy of Bush. Whenever an administration changes you get endless debate as to who is responsible for what. In fact much of political discourse is about attribution and accountability, where attribution is about attempting to demonstrate that an agent caused something to happen and accountability is whether they should be punished or rewarded for what has happened. (See the article here for more on attribution and accountability within outcomes theory).
For anyone who has watched a couple of election cycles it quickly becomes clear that you are not going to get any sense out of politicians on this matter. They routinely will blame the opposite party for all that is wrong and claim credit for themselves for all that is right (starting by claiming credit for the sun rising in the morning and then moving on from there). As any evaluator knows, the question of demonstrating attribution is a complex technical matter.
Is it time that we stopped relying on politicians to inform us as to who we should blame for what? They suffer from a serious case of conflict of interest in the matter. How about setting up an Attribution Commission? Its job would be to independently examine major issues and make a technical judgement as to whether it is reasonable to attribute most of some outcome to one or another administration.
In this case its findings could run something like: Its reasonable to attribute most of the deficit to Bush; or, its reasonable to attribute most of the deficit to Obama: or in some cases, it is not possible to clearly attribute the phenomena of interest to one or other administration. I would certainly be much more interested in hearing from such a commission in preference to just listening to the endless claims by politicians that it is the other party which is to blame when they have no expertise in working out what is attributable to whom.
Paul Duignan, PhD
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[...] out what is, and what is not, demonstrably attributable. This leads onto a concept I advanced in a previous blog, of having something which could be labeled an ‘Attribution Commission’. It’s job [...]