Where are the advocates for businesspeople and investors in President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration? So far, not one of his cabinet appointments, especially those dealing with the economy, has any significant business experience, and there is little to be seen on the résumés of the likely candidates for as-yet-unfilled positions.
The appointees are brilliant economic thinkers, but they need some colleagues with real-world business experience to add reality to that brilliance.
Some might argue that the business background of key members of the Bush administration — from the president himself to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — did no good for the economy.
But going to the other extreme — totally ignoring experience in how the business world works — is unlikely to be good for the country as a whole or for investors. This is particularly true for the senior economic-policy team.
The Obama economic team so far is dominated by academics with no real-life experience, from his choices for Treasury secretary to chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to secretary of commerce.
If the business community was overrepresented in the Bush administration, it looks to be underrepresented in the incoming Obama administration.
All the nominees so far, and most of those on the list of likely candidates for other key positions, have spent their entire working lives on the government payroll, in academia or at think tanks. Few have had to worry about making a profit to meet the payroll.
For example, Timothy Geithner, whom Mr. Obama nominated as Treasury secretary, has no experience in private banking or finance. Mr. Geithner's career took him through the Department of the Treasury to the International Monetary Fund to the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Christine Romer, the nominated chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has been an academic all her working life and is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bill Richardson, nominated to be secretary of commerce, has been a career politician except for two brief periods when he was president of the Richardson Trade Group, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based international-trade consulting firm, and a managing director of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic-advisory firm in Washington. He also served on several corporate boards in between elected office.
Peter Orszag, nominated to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, is another academic who has spent his career either in the protected world of government service or think tanks.
Other Obama economic advisers likely to be named to key positions, such as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, likewise have no business experience.
Mr. Obama could strengthen the economic team by adding some recently retired business executives or by luring some currently employed executives to government service.
They would provide advice on the real effects, as distinct from academic theories and guesses, on employment and investment of various tax policies.
Mr. Obama has promised changes to current policies which will have large effects on the business and investment communities, including changes in corporate taxes, capital gains and
dividend taxes, health care, trade policy and labor policy.
He shouldn't develop such changes without input from the private sector through some members of his team.
Mr. Obama has said he doesn't want a team solely comprising those who agree with him, but so far, there is no obvious contrary opinion on the economic team.
The private sector needs some advocates in the new administration, if only because it will find few in Congress where its natural allies, the Republicans, have been reduced to a virtually helpless minority.
