How many Ph.D economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Or more to the point, to turn the economy's lights back on? Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics asks a number of prominent economists for their impressions of Barack Obama's economic team. A number of respondents took note of the high firepower of Obama's team as compared to Bush the Younger's. A number note that BTY rarely listened to the good economists he did have. Brad DeLong's analysis:

The Bush White House was lousy with Ph.D. economists as well: they did not listen to them at all. Why Democratic economists seem to have a lot more power than Republican economists in administrations is an interesting question that I am not sure I know the answer to.

One possibility is that in the Bush administration, you did not have the kind of strong internal protests against administration policy that, say, Summers and Lipton made at Clinton’s acquiescence in Yeltsin’s loans-for-shares program (see Strobe Talbott’s memoirs) or the kind of strong external protests that Joe Stiglitz made after he went rogue. Thus it may be that the Bush economists were viewed as cyphers that could be ignored. Clearly the difference in the quality of economic policy made over the past generation by the two parties has been very, very visible.

I think a more powerful force working against the academic economists under BTY was that as a matter of principle he and his administration simply did not care what they had to say. They came into office with a set of preconceived policy preferences: tax cuts, deregulation, privatization of Social Security, dismantling of much of the social safety net, and other pet projects of the supply-side right wing; plus a few programs like the Medicare prescription drug program that were adopted in the campaign to defend Bush's flank against the Democrats. With this agenda set in stone, they really didn't need economists to devise policies to address important economic issues that arose over the last eight years; they needed economists to help them sell their agenda. You don't need a Ph.D to sell tax cuts to the rich, so there was no inclination to employ Ph.D's to make policy or to listen to them when (if?) they objected.