Jon Reisman

Economists were invented to make weather forecasters and astrologers look good.

An economist is a trained professional paid to guess wrong about the economy.

How many economists are needed to run a country? It doesn't matter, because nobody listens to them.

What do you get when you cross an economist with a Mafia godfather? An offer you can’t understand.

Then there is Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic: a scoundrel who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

This month, I turn 69 and am somewhat reflective. In a month and an era where economists have shown why the above quotes continue to resonate, I have been examining my history as a registered member of the dismal science and wondering when that registration first occurred.

In 1984, with a full head of hair and aviator glasses, I started 38 years of teaching Principles of Economics and a suite of economics, government, and public policy courses at the University of Maine at Machias. Prior to that, Brown University granted me economist tribe graduate degree membership in 1979. The economics department at Colby had sent me off to Brown in 1977. I started as an environmental studies major at Colby, but my first economics course in the fall of my sophomore year in 1974 tapped something in me: I was meant to be an economist, looking for the optimal allocation of resources. But the economist's destiny, identity, and proclivities went back even farther...

From 1968 to 1973, every morning I delivered the Philadelphia Inquirer to some 100 plus households in my Philadelphia (East Oak Lane) neighborhood. I quickly decided to collect half of the bills every other week, rather than every bill each week. A modest investment reduced my collection hours by half. I also read the paper every day, and my economics, political, and policy training was underway.

But the economist's fate goes back even further. My father took this picture in 1961, when his oh-so-serious son told his mother she should buy gallon instead of half gallon milk cartons, because it would save money (I don’t think “efficiency was part of my 5-year-old vocabulary, and Pareto-optimality certainly wasn’t), and I was big enough to lift the gallon jug. My biggest economist influencers were Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose, 1976 Nobel Laureate) and F. A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, Law and Liberty, 1974 Nobel Laureate).

So, I’ve been or destined to be an economist since JFK was President. And here is this 64 years as an economist scream:

Inflation is a sustained increase in the Price level. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by increasing the money supply (see Milton Friedman). Tariffs may cause an initial round of price increases, but not sustained increases. Tariffs do not cause inflation. Lax monetary policy does.

Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Selectman and a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own, and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here or to him directly via email at [email protected].