Peter Orszag has what I think is a very good column about the desirability of increasing automaticity in certain aspects of American policymaking that’s been given provocative framing around the idea that America needs “less democracy.”

Provocative framing has a lot of marketing value, but it also provokes lots of people to disagree with you and I saw Orzag’s thesis being subjected to a lot of unwarranted scorn earlier today. I would suggest that people ignore the framing and focus on what he’s actually saying. He seems to have two really concrete suggestions. One is that we should try to enhance the scope of “automatic stabilizers” in American fiscal policy. This is orthodox Keynesian thinking and not something any progressive should have a problem with. The other is that we should strengthen the hand of non-elected boards to make adjustments to Medicare payment rates. Some progressives may have a problem with this on the grounds that cutting spending is a bad idea. But most progressives I know also claim to be admirers of single-payer health care systems that do a better job than America’s of controlling health care costs. The way that they do this is precisely through the sort of technocratic price controls that Orszag is praising.

What I would say on both sides is that framing everything as a conversation around more or less “democracy” is a foolish way to think about institutional design. In a democracy, political authorities are accountable to citizens. That principle is compatible with a wide array of institutional schemes. Electing Supreme Court justices to two-year terms wouldn’t make America “more democratic,” it would make us worse governed. Adopting default rules that strengthen automatic stabilizers wouldn’t be “less democratic,” it would be a good idea.

Former White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag needed a job to do after leaving Washington, and unfortunately for him the only gigs available were high paying jobs for Wall Street banks. And as Orzag makes clear in remarks offered to Gabe Sherman for a New York Magazine profile he’s really upset at the way this paucity of options has left him vulnerable to criticism from people who don’t understand the difficulty of his position. All the man wanted, after all, was a challenge.

What a time it was.

“I could have been totally comfortable doing something easy,” he told Sherman, “going back to academe or a think tank, giving speeches, having a cushy consulting thing—ironically, which would have played off my White House experience much more than what I chose to do. Or I could have done something new, which would be harder.”

You’ve got to respect that. Which is why it’s so tragic that the small matter of his multi-million dollar payday at Citi has turned a man who just wants a challenge into the subject of ire. Fortunately, there’s a pretty easy solution to this problem. Just take the extra money and give it away. Hang on to the salary of an OMB director. Heck, hang on to double the salary of an OMB director and donate the rest of the cash to charity. Maybe give it to a think tank that he thinks is doing good work. Or just hand a check over to the next homeless guy he sees. Oxfam and UNICEF do good work. There are lots of options out there. And in the spirit of self-sacrifice and taking on new challenges, I’d be happy to volunteer to do some research on the subject and write up a memo.

This is all a bit tongue in cheek, but really only a bit. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of rich banker types really do feel that all they want is job where they do rigorous, difficult, high-status work and they’re just kind of stuck being despised fatcats who people say mean things about on the Internet. So give the money up!

I’m not sure how much there is to say about the reports today that OMB Director Peter Orszag will be leaving next month, but it’s worth observing that this is a high-turnover job. Presidents Clinton and Bush managed to go through eight OMB Directors, one of whom only made it thirteen months.

It occurs to me that one way in which the Obama White House differs from the Bush White House is that many more of its personnel are “characters” each with their own independent profile in DC. So fairly routine comings-and-goings or the inevitable disagreements about policy direction or points of emphasis can wind up looming larger in the media than a comparative context would suggest.

Responding to today’s new, more pessimistic CBO scoring of the president’s budget in light of the deteriorating economic situation, Peter Orszag was at pains to emphasize that deficit projections are highly sensitive to relatively small changes in assumptions. For example, suppose that first you project revenues of $100 and spending of $103 for a $3 deficit. Then you get some bad news about the economy so projected revenue drops by five percent. Well, suddenly you’re looking at a deficit of $8. The alarming way to put this is that the deficit has nearly tripled. The calm way is that revenue has fallen by 5 percent.

Beyond that, Orszag observes that differences between OMB and CBO projections are normal, observes that CBO’s growth estimate is not only lower than OMB’s, but also lower than the Fed’s and lower than the blue chip forecast. He says that to put the issues in perspective, but “we recognize that the budget resolution will be written off the CBO numbers.” Thus, he reiterates the four main principles that animated the administration’s budget proposal. He doesn’t expect congress to return exactly what they wrote up, but he does expect it to adhere to these principles:

• “must invest in health care”
• “must invest in education”
• “must invest in clean energy”
• “must cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term”

In general, Orszag downplayed the significance of this report, saying that of course it will be taken into account as congress does its work “it’s not like the process would normally just have them take the budget, xerox it, and vote on it” so we shouldn’t think of congress tinkering with the proposal as being in response to the budget projections as such. “It’s a normal part of the legislative process to take the core things the president wants to get done and then work within those boundaries … beyond that, developments are ongoing and you’ll see the chairman’s marks some time next week.”

For the past few days, I’ve been reading Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. I’ve also been feeling like over the same time span, the Obama administration has shifted its public rhetoric in the direction Akerlof and Shiller would suggest. Turns out this is not a coincidence. Michael Scherer reports:

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag is a numbers guy, a propeller head as President Obama would say. But as David Von Drehle and I write in this week’s print version of TIME, Orszag has been spending his time recently reading not about spreadsheets, but about psychology. In particular, he has been reading a new book by the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller called “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives The Economy, and Why It Matters For Global Capitalism.” [...]

The White House is trying to recreate a sense of confidence by pointing out all the measurements that suggest the sudden loss of confidence may be causing the same irrational result that the confidence bubble created. Of course, the White House must walk a delicate line here, for even the smartest people in the Washington do not know when the markets will stop sinking. No one can predict the animal spirits. As Obama said Thursday, “The market is going to be responding to all this information out there and, you know, the whole issue of animal spirits in the marketplace and when suddenly a rally catches, you know, you guys know that better than I do. But my focus has to be on the long term. And my long-term projections are highly optimistic — if we take care of some of these long-term structural problems.”

Reading: It’s fundamental.