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by rtfs 3389 days ago
good post. add some stories about dealing with lobbyists as an economist, and the post will be even more interesting.
1 comments

In most agencies, economists almost never interact with lobbyists. The lobbyists always aim at senior management, and almost all lobbying takes the form of 'We care about X and we want you to validate that by signalling that you also care about X' or 'We are presenting a credible threat to sue you if you do Y'. This is useful political and tactical information for management, but it does not affect the economic numbers at all. In theory a lobbyist could present useful information about a hard-to-research topic that informs our analysis, but I've never seen that happen.