This is disgusting: Senate Republicans holding up Peter Diamond’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that he may not be qualified to make monetary policy. Aside from the fact that the same Senators cheerfully confirmed Bush nominees who didn’t know much about economics of any kind, this is especially stupid right now.
Why? Because right now one of the hot topics is whether the apparent shift in the Beveridge curve signals a rise in structural unemployment — and Diamond wrote the seminal paper on the whole subject — the top result on Google scholar.
Diamond is exactly the man we need — which, given the way things have been going lately, probably means he won’t get confirmed.
Update: Some commenters note, correctly, that there’s an ongoing dispute over what the rise in vacancies without a corresponding fall in unemployment means. But that’s precisely the point: we want Peter Diamond, who pioneered the whole study of this subject, in the Fed, where he can help make sense of the situation.
