I’m a Furman fan, not least because he had the guts to defend Wal-Mart [PDF]. But Felix Salmon’s take on a recent blogger call — I wasn’t invited, which leads me to believe that the White House knows that I only communicate via smoke signal — gives me pause:

Mike Konczal honed in, with his question, on one of the key vicious cycles in the economy: the high unemployment rate is making the housing market worse, and then in turn the weak housing market is exacerbating the unemployment rate, by making it much harder for people to move to where the jobs are.
Furman waffled a bit, saying that while a couple of years ago it was the housing market which was instrumental in causing the broader economic crisis, now the “direction of causation” is in many cases the other way around, with the weak economy hurting the housing market. Well, yes. But that doesn’t really say much about jobs.
So I asked him again, about jobs in particular, and Furman started talking about the drivers of economic recovery, and how this time around it’s not going to be housing. He did eventually manage to bring jobs in, saying that the infrastructure bill and the R&D credit and the small business bill “taken together would have a meaningful impact on unemployment today”.
But they wouldn’t, would they. Of the three, only the small business bill looks like it’s really targeted at creating jobs, as opposed to stimulating the economy more broadly and hoping that somehow higher GDP is going to feed through into lower unemployment.

Furman is savvy enough to know that the bloggers in question were unlikely to find his answers satisfactory. But I guess it’s good that the Obama administration is reaching out to at least some of its critics.

I should add that Furman’s remarks suggest that Mike was right and I was wrong: the White House really is trying to sell the R&D credit as stimulus, which is flatly absurd.