Keynesian policy questioned

I have given up on macroeconomics.

Certainly it is a worthy field of study. But the science is too young, the systems it studies are too complex, and its practitioners are too often politicized for me to take its prescripts seriously in most policy debates.

Last week President Obama visited a new stimulus-funded electric-vehicle battery manufacturing facility in Michigan. The factory produces a product for which there is virtually no market, where worldwide manufacturing capacity already outpaces demand by a factor of three, and whose sales will depend on the government heavily subsidizing its customers.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman often writes that only by authorizing much more of exactly this kind of government spending can we pull out of the current recession. Apparently, the way to economic growth is to have the operator of the Post Office, rather than private individuals, invest money. Hearing this, I can't come to any conclusion except that the field of macroeconomics is lost.

My training is not in economics, but in business and management. Perhaps I am biased by my background, which includes 15 years of strategy and planning at large corporations and 10 years running my own business. But my framework for economic growth is a simple one: For growth to occur, someone has to make an investment.

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