A weak Treasury response

A friend sends me Secretary Makhlouf's response to my NBR column in last week's Treasury's internal newsletter:

Economics and the Treasury There is an opinion piece in today’s NBR critiquing the representation of economists at the Treasury, with a strong focus on our hiring of non-economists.  I hope that nobody takes this opinion piece personally.  Economics expertise is absolutely valued by the Treasury – we need it and want to build our capability in it – and we are always delighted to get job applicants with tertiary qualifications in economics.   But we also know that considering only people with economics degrees would mean shutting ourselves off from a very big pool of talented applicants.  Doing our job well requires knowledge, analytical skills, an understanding of context, and the ability to explain clearly.  It depends on the minds, insights, and life experiences of the people that make up our organisation.  Broader thinking strengthens rather than dilutes our capabilities as the Government’s lead economic and financial adviser, and our high performance in areas like forecasting, tax advice, analytics, long-term funding advice and many other fields demonstrates this.  I want everyone to know that we value the contribution you make to the Treasury irrespective of what your particular academic discipline is.
 Moreover, and more fundamentally, I think that this critique represents a strain of thinking which narrows the role of the Treasury and what good economics is actually about. I’ve spoken about this publically many times in the last few years.  And you can expect me to continue to stress this point in the public domain.

Good economics is broad. It encompasses any area where choosing agents face opportunity costs. I am not arguing for a narrowing of the domain but of a deepening of the economic talent pool at Treasury to make sure they're able to produce reliable economic analysis across it.

It would be absurd to claim that Treasury should only hire economists. A fresh economics graduate would make a hash of things if set to do Vote analysis work unless under the guidance of someone who really knew the accounts. I've got a PhD but I haven't any accounting background - I wouldn't be suited to a lot of that work either. Treasury needs accountants. It needs tax specialists. It needs lawyers.

But it doesn't need recruitment rounds where only one of nine recruits has a graduate qualification in economics when it's also been losing more senior economic talent.

And it doesn't need to be setting a recruitment framework that tells good economics graduates that Treasury is a place where they are not wanted. New Zealand is a small town. When Treasury goes around the country making recruitment pitches emphasising that you don't need economics to work at Treasury, and celebrate having not hired any single-major economists, decent graduates who want to do economics can easily conclude that that work is no longer welcome in Treasury.

And I know that I am far from the only one noticing the problem.