Meet President-elect Trump’s economic advisers

It’s looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. His campaign has been unusually sparse on economic policy details, so it’s helpful to look at the people who have been advising Trump during the campaign season — and are likely to play key roles in the Trump administration.

Trump first unveiled a list of his economic advisers back in August, and it is about what you’d expect from the real estate tycoon.

He has vowed to bring a more businesslike approach to government; his list is dominated by businessmen — including several billionaires. He has railed against political correctness; his economic advisers are entirely white men. He has disparaged conventional policy experts; the list includes only one academic economist.

The names on Trump’s economic team suggest that — aside from trade issues — his policies wouldn’t be radically different from those of previous Republican administrations. Republican administrations are traditionally friendly to big businesses and wealthy people, and these groups are well-represented on the list. The list even includes a devoted supply-sider from the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggesting that Trump may follow through on his promise for a broad tax cut.

This was the list that Trump presented in August:

The businesspeople on Trump’s list include several distinguished names. Hedge fund manager John Paulson became famous in 2007 when he made billions betting against the housing market. Steve Roth built a billion-dollar real estate empire in New York.

Andy Beal made billions in real estate while also becoming an accomplished poker player and number theorist. He developed the Beal conjecture, a mathematical proposition related to Fermat’s Last Theorem, and then funded a $1 million prize for anyone who could solve it. And like Paulson, he saw the 2008 crash coming. He stopped buying during the last years of the real estate boom, 2004 to 2007, leaving him with plenty of cash on hand to snap up bargains in the post-crash environment of 2009.

Private equity investor Stephen Feinberg is worth more than $1 billion, but he doesn’t share Donald Trump’s taste for ostentatious displays of wealth. “In general, I think that all of us are way overpaid in this business,” he said in 2011. “It is almost embarrassing.”

Also on the list: Howard Lorber, who has major holdings in cigarettes as well as real estate.

In short, Trump has assembled an independent-minded and opinionated collection of rich businessmen. They could provide a valuable conduit for dissenting points of view that — judging from the way Trump has run his campaigns and his businesses — might otherwise be lacking from a Trump administration.

It’s customary for presidential candidates — especially Republican presidential candidates — to include some business leaders among their economic advisers, but most candidates also include people with significant academic expertise or government experience.

John McCain’s list of economic advisers included six economics professors and three other people who were chief economists for private companies. McCain’s list also had about a dozen people with government experience, including several veterans of the George W. Bush administration. Mitt Romney also drew heavily on credentialed economists with senior government experience.

In contrast, Trump’s list includes only one academic economist, Peter Navarro of the University of California Irvine. David Malpass served in several midlevel government positions during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Tom Barrack was deputy undersecretary for the Department of the Interior during the Reagan administration. The list also includes conservative activist and former Wall Street Journal economics writer Stephen Moore.

The character of Trump’s list may have to do with the candidate’s belief that he’d be better off without the help of government veterans and credentialed academics. It also might have to do with the fact that the most experienced economic policy hands in the Republican Party have largely shunned Trump.

Greg Mankiw, for example, is a Harvard economist who served in the George W. Bush administration. In a recent blog post, he wrote that Trump wouldn’t get his vote because he finds Trump’s protectionist views “disqualifying.” John McCain’s top 2008 economic adviser — and former head of the Congressional Budget Office — Douglas Holtz-Eakin savaged Trump’s economic ideas, describing his plans for mass deportation of immigrants as “utterly unworkable.”

Glenn Hubbard, Mitt Romney’s top economic adviser and former adviser to George W. Bush, hasn’t been too kind to Trump either. He argues that Trump’s trade policies would “raise the prices of consumer goods for all Americans, raising the cost of living especially for the poor.”

One side effect of academic distaste for Trump is that a man who needs seasoned policy advice more than any other recent president may start off with a very shallow bench of trusted advisers with real economic policy expertise.

That’s a problem, because while businesspeople have a lot of valuable insights about the economy, there are some aspects of economic policy where formal training is indispensable. A successful career in business doesn’t give anyone insights about monetary policy or allow them to navigate the intricacies of the federal budget process. For some aspects of federal policy, there’s no substitute for careful study combined with practical experience.

By naming former steel executive Dan DiMicco as an economic adviser, Trump is underscoring his commitment to protectionist trade policies — a sharp contrast with other recent Republican administrations. DiMicco wrote a 2015 book calling for manufacturing jobs to be brought back to the United States. Like Trump, DiMicco blames recent trade deals and foreign countries that don’t “play by the rules” for declining employment in the manufacturing sector.

But Trump’s other choices suggest more continuity with past Republican policies. Stephen Moore now works for the Heritage Foundation, which has played a key role in Republican policymaking since the Reagan administration. He’s a devoted supply-sider, and we can expect him to push Trump to follow through on his promises for big tax cuts.

And while Trump has sought to paint Clinton as a tool of Wall Street, his own economic advisers have extensive Wall Street connections. One of them, Steven Mnuchin, is even a veteran of Goldman Sachs, a frequent target of Trump’s ire. This suggests we might need to take Trump’s populist rhetoric about Wall Street with a grain of salt.