The very sharp Simon Wren-Lewis lives in a Manichean world: good academic economists, bad "City" economists, and bad journalists who do not know or perhaps do not care to highlight the difference. The problem is that here in America we have not a lot of but we do have influential academic economists who manage to neutralize the voice of those who know what they are talking about: Simon Wren-Lewis: Experts and Elites: "The view of the overwhelming majority academic economists that Brexit will be harmful is going to be ignored by many.... The neoliberal right has had an interest in discrediting economic expertise, and replacing academic economists with City economists in positions of influence.... Right wing think tanks like the IEA are particularly useful in this respect.... Just look at how the media began to treat climate change as controversial...
....Why would members of the public... believe politicians and their backers when they attack academics? In the case of Brexit, and I think other issues like austerity, these elites have two advantages. The first is access.... A right-wing elite can get a message across despite it being misleading or simply untrue.... Journalists... read repeated messages about failed forecasts in the right-wing press, but very little about how GDP is currently around 2.5% lower as a result of Brexit, and real wages are lower still. The second is that the elite often plays on a simple understanding of how things work, and dismisses anything more complex, when it suits them.... In the case of the economic effects of Brexit, it is obvious that we will save money by not paying in to the EU, whereas everything else is uncertain and who believes forecasts etc....
Attacks by elites on experts tend to come from the political right and not the left, and the neoliberal right in particular because they have an ideology to sell...
#shouldread
