Charles Wheelan, Ph.D. The Naked Economist

I have a unique New Year's resolution this year: I'd like to become a member of Congress.

The Naked Congressman?

Really. I'm running for Congress in the 5th District of Illinois.

The whole election came up suddenly. I live in Chicago; Rahm Emanuel is my congressman. When he resigns to become Barack Obama's chief of staff, the seat will be filled by special election. (Our governor -- the same guy who tried to sell a Senate seat -- is responsible for calling the special election within 120 days of Rahm's resignation.) I'm running as a centrist Democrat, advocating the kind of pragmatic problem-solving that I've been writing about in this column for years.

So this particular column is in part a farewell. (If I'm back in a few months, you'll know that I lost.) It's also an explanation: Why would a sane person with multiple enjoyable jobs want to be a politician?

Off the Sidelines, Into the Game

The answer is that for someone interested in economics, what's going on in the world right now is a scary version of the seventh game of the World Series. What happens in Washington in the next couple of years is going to matter more than at any time since the Great Depression. The curious thing about being a columnist and a professor is that I spend my life critiquing the work of others, not unlike a sports commentator. We're all brilliant while standing on the sidelines. Right now, I want to get in the game.

The global economy is in a very dangerous place, and we need to stop the negative feedback loops -- the bad economic events that are causing further bad events and putting us at risk of a downward spiral. The remarkable thing about markets is that 99.9 percent of the time, they fix themselves. If there's a sudden shortage of bauxite in the world, the price of bauxite goes up sharply, setting in motion assorted cures for the shortage: Consumers use less of it; mines produce more; entrepreneurs find bauxite substitutes; and so on.

But that other 1 percent of the time, bad economic developments breed more problems rather than cures. That's where we are right now. The collapse of the housing bubble destabilized Wall Street, which weakened the banks, which caused the credit markets to seize up, which caused businesses and consumers to stop spending, which is now causing a whole new wave of economic distress that makes all of the earlier problems worse, too. This cycle feeds on itself until government policy stops it; I'd rather design that policy than critique it from the sidelines.

Foreign Policy Concerns

Although Americans don't usually pay much attention to foreign policy, now would be a really good time to start. While we're obsessing over the Dow and the dismal Christmas retail figures, there are a handful of trouble spots on the globe that could unravel in ways that would literally change life as we know it.

My top three foreign policy concerns are: 1) Iran seeking nuclear weapons; 2) India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) massing troops on their border; and 3) Instability in Iraq as the United States withdraws.

I spend a lot of time working on these issues. I was in Turkey before Christmas meeting with government officials, and in Lebanon a few weeks before that. The good news is that Barack Obama has generated remarkable excitement. The bad news is that it's going to take more than excitement to broker Middle East peace, secure Afghanistan, get the United States safely out of Iraq, neuter al Qaeda, and do all the other things we must do.

The Potholes Can Wait

My campaign team has played around with the Naked Economist brand. Unfortunately, "Naked Congressman" doesn't send exactly the right message. (Also, while there's only one Naked Economist, apparently there have been a lot of naked congressmen.) Instead, I'm trying to convince more than just my immediate family that now is a good time to send a representative to Washington who's versed in economics and foreign policy. (Or, as I say in my more cynical moments, "It's not pothole-filling time.")

My pathetic governor, Rod Blagojevich, has actually made things a little easier for me. As the people of Chicago read the transcripts of him taking bids for Barack Obama's Senate seat, it's fairly clear that we ought to deviate from Chicago politics-as-usual. (In defense of Illinois, we also produced Barack Obama, who taught at the University of Chicago before turning to elected office, so I'm pushing that model!)

If you want to check my progress, visit the Wheelan for Congress website. Or you can just wait to see if my column reappears sometime during the spring. If I win, I'll make policy rather than writing about it. If I lose, I can go back to complaining in print -- but with the knowledge that when times got tough, my name was on the ballot.