The cost of governing without honest numbers

CNBC reports that Pierre Yared, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, is leaving his post. The CEA, established in 1946, exists for one purpose: to give the president a clear-eyed account of the economy — not the account that flatters, but the account that is true. I spent years as a printer. I know what happens when you set the type to please the patron rather than report the fact. The reader is deceived, and eventually so is the patron himself.

I will not pretend to know the particular reasons for Mr. Yared's departure — the CNBC lead does not say, and I will not invent what I do not know. What I do know, from long observation of councils and courts and colonial assemblies, is that the pattern of departures matters as much as any single exit. One adviser leaves: that is circumstance. A succession of them: that is a signal worth reading.

The working tradesman and the small farmer are not much acquainted with the Council of Economic Advisers by name. But they are intimately acquainted with its consequences. When the president receives sound advice on inflation, on trade balances, on the cost of borrowing, and acts on it, the price of bread and the rate on a mortgage are the downstream result. Discard the advisers, and you do not discard the consequences — you merely lose your early warning of them.

I was in my time a great believer in what I called the disinterested friend — the person who will tell you that your invention does not work, that your bill of credit is too loosely secured, that your accounts do not balance as prettily as you suppose. Such friends are rare and valuable precisely because they cost you comfort in the short run. A president who surrounds himself only with agreement purchases a pleasant morning and a difficult harvest.

My counsel to any citizen watching this: pay attention not to who fills the seat next, but to what latitude they are given to speak plainly. An economic adviser who must agree before speaking has already ceased to advise. The question to ask of any replacement is not their credentials — credentials are easily assembled — but whether they have, in their past work, ever delivered an unwelcome truth to a powerful person. That is the only credential that matters for this particular post.

A friend in power is a friend lost — unless that friend is free to disagree. The nation's household accounts deserve at least as much candor as your own.