On Brad DeLong’s blog, the article Review of Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” confirms my worst fears about how the Obama administration has dealt with the economy.  That fear is that Obama’s economic policy was anemic not because he didn’t fight hard enough for the right policies.  It was anemic because Obama convinced himself, contrary to all good advice, that the wrong policies were needed and that the right policies were not needed.

On this blog I don’t intend to repeat the information in the articles to which I point.  I want to give you enough information to encourage you to read the whole articles yourself.  This is especially true of this article.  So, keep in mind that in the following you will only get a pale shadow of the information of the whole article.

For the most part DeLong does not think that Ron Suskind did a good job with his book.

And, as Ezra Klein points out, the stories Suskind does tell repeatedly undermine his global narrative claim that the administration’s big problem was that Lawrence Summers was (a) too sure of himself, and (b) so good a debater that he won internal arguments he ought to have lost. If Larry Summers had been winning all the internal policy arguments, Ezra points out, then administration policy would have gone in “the direction Suskind clearly wishes the White House had gone.”

However, DeLong does list quite a few things that he learned from the book.  The following is one of the items I find indicative of Obama’s failings:

I learn that Barack Obama was attracted to the idea that on top of our business-cycle demand-driven downturn was a longer-run trend rise in technological unemployment that virtually guaranteed that the recovery would be “jobless”:

[Summers and Romer] were concerned by something the president had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled. “What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could have been coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.” Summers had been focused intently on how to spur demand, and on what might drive a meaningful recovery…. [W]ithout a rise in demand, in Summers’s view, nothing else would work…. But productivity?… If Obama felt that 10 percent unemployment was the product of sound, productivity-driven decisions by American business, then short-term government measures to spur hiring were not only futile but unwise. The two economists strained their memory… had they said something he’d misconstrued?… After a month, frustration turned to resignation. “The president seems to have developed his own view,” Romer said.

I found a link to chapter 1 of Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President by Ronald Suskind.

The New Yorker has an article on the book titled The Book on Barack.