400 Economists Endorse Romney

A former conservative official has rallied 400 economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, to sign a statement supporting Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economists Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott and Myron Scholes are among the names listed on the website, Economists for Romney.

The site’s founder, James Carter, was a deputy assistant Treasury secretary of former President George W. Bush. Economists for Romney describes itself as “an independent, voluntary association of economists” supporting the former Massachusetts governor and says it “is not an official arm of the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign.”

AdvisorOne could find no comparable list of economists supporting President Obama, though the prominent liberal economist Brad DeLong derided the list on his blog, suggesting its signers should “back out” now that Romney has chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as his running mate. DeLong also said 400 was not a high number in comparison to the more than 1,000 economists who Republican presidents have appointed to positions on the Council of Economic Advisers.

The list is reminiscent of the support Obama received in his first presidential run, when six Nobel Prize-winning economists and others including DeLong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, supported the president. The Nobel winners included Paul Krugman, Daniel McFadden, Edmund Phelps, Amartya Sen, Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz.

It is not clear how many of these economists still count themselves as Obama supporters. The Obama campaign has yet to respond to a request from AdvisorOne for a list of current supporters among economists.