In the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch, economists Veronique de Rugy, Ryan Daza, and Daniel B. Klein have an article titled “Why Weren’t Left Economists More Opposed and More Vocal on the Export-Import Bank?” It’s a good article but it doesn’t really answer the question in the title.

Why is it a good article? Mainly because of what appears to be a fairly thorough job of collecting and categorizing the blog posts on the Export-Import Bank. They write:

We used an August 2013 Onalytica ranking of the top 200 influential economics blogs, ordered by their “Onalytica Influence Index”. At each of the blogs, we searched for “export-import bank,” “export-import,” “ex-im,” and “exim,” using the blog’s internal search engine (if available), supplemented by Google’s search engine when the internal engine yielded no results. We did not limit the search to any particular start date, so the results reach as far back in time as results were found, and go up to August 1, 2015. All results are included in this research.

Reminder: As noted at the time, Econlog was rated 12th out of the top 200.

But why is the title inappropriate? Because they don’t answer the question it raises. Indeed, they don’t even try very hard.

That’s too bad because the results stand on their own. A better title would have been “Left Economists Not Vocal or Not Opposed to the Export-Import Bank.” That in itself is a powerful finding. What they found is consistent with my casual impression, but the data are overwhelming.