I came across this Economist blog postgoverned the other day and I am not happy about it . The central argument presented here is summarised as followsTake regional inequality . The economic literature is pretty clear that moving people from low productivity places to high productivity places is very good for both the people that move and the economy as a whole . It ' s also pretty clear that placebased policies designed to rejuvenate regions which have lost their economic reason for being tend not to work very well . And one logical conclusion to draw from these lines of research is that government ought to care about people rather than places , should focus aid to struggling places on things like cash transfers or retraining schemes or efforts to boost the housing capacity of booming regions , and should not be sentimental about the prospect of once proud industrial cities emptying out . And maybe that logical conclusion is the right one . But maybe that ' s not the right conclusion at all . Maybe the right question , once again , is which is likely to be more corrosive of the legitimacy of valuable macroinstitutions the longrun decline of whole regions of advanced economies , or the inevitable waste and inefficiency that would accompany an effort to revive those declining regions . And perhaps benign neglect would win that argument . Yet the argument ought to take place economists should not ignore the relevance and importance of macroinstitutions and assume that the inefficiency is the clinching argument . I have a big problem with the woolly definition of macroinstitutions . This word seems useless to me . The way it is used here is essentially the followingWe should advocate inefficient policies because advocating for efficiency ~~ hurts people ' s feelings ~~ causes faith in macroinstitutions to decline . Even though logically the literature is quite clear we should not assume that it is the clinching argument . Screw that . I get that Trump won . I get that Brexit happened . I refuse to bow to this . Who is with me ?