6/25/2023 0 Comments Attention attention imagesWhat happened when two researchers were given access to the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) database is indicative of this. Since access to most large datasets is tightly controlled by a few corporations and bureaucrats, such access can be weaponised to favour economists who may be willing to toe the line of the data controllers. There are new inducements in the age of big data. Others do this because they are well-trained to recognise which side their bread is buttered on. Some do this out of genuine ideological commitment. When not advancing the interests of their particular bank or industry lobby, macroeconomists and policy economists are often found propagating their pet political agendas in the garb of scientific advice. The second issue relates to the political economy of economic advice. This must be clearly communicated to non-economists in a language they understand, not in economists’ tribal jargon. Hence the results of their modelling are, at best indicative in nature. The models that economists use to make sense of a complex world are often as imperfect as the ones that epidemiologists used to track the spread of a new virus. If economists are to be seen as a responsible and professional tribe, they must be unafraid to outline the limited powers of economic analysis. They lead the public astray with their confident pronouncements, and are often unapologetic when they get things wrong. Economists involved in the business of policy making and forecasting have often been unwilling to highlight the limitations of their prescriptions and forecasts. Economists’ complaints about epidemiological models would have been taken more seriously if economists had been more transparent about the limitations of their own analysis. To win back public trust, economists will need to address three key issues that have eroded their influence over the years. The answer perhaps lies in the growing disenchantment with economists across the globe. Why did economists have so little influence on such momentous decisions? In other parts of the world, such complaints were often voiced in public but were ignored. In the early days of the lockdown, one economic advisor to the Indian government complained to me about the excessive reliance on under-cooked epidemiological models. Most governments across the world chose to lean on epidemiologists and doctors while ignoring contrary voices among economists. It is not just the US that eschewed a cost-benefit analysis in imposing and extending lockdowns. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.” It was for other people to make broader assessments - people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. “.The surgeon general is not an economist. “I’m not an economist,” Fauci said in the interview.
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