The No-Economist Left Behind Test

In 2005, during our social security debate, President Bush had launched a privatized social security. The point that I've been writing about that was, no, that doesn't make any sense. And I actually came up with something, well, originally in joke, but it was very useful. It's called the no-economist left behind test. That was a play on Bush, because he talked about no child left behind his education form. In order to have it sold as Brookings paper, we had to have this intertemporal optimizing model. But they were considerably more complex than simple algebra.