Smart People Should be Honest
I just got through listening to two Economists debate the pro's and con's of the Bush Tax Cuts on NPR. Economics is a soft science, I know, but it is still a field which demands a high level of expertise to speak knowledgably on. Non-experts, like myself, must defer to people like Dan Mitchell, Ph.D, senior fellow in Political Economy at the Heritage Foundation and Jason Furman, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for their insights, right? Otherwise, how the fuck do I know who to vote for?
What I want to know is this: How can two expert Economists, at the very top of their feild, be diametrically opposed on every single point concerning Bush's 2001 tax cuts? How can they examine the same mathmatical data and come to such staggeringly different conclusions? You don't see heart surgeons behaving this way. Cigarrets and alcohol are bad for your heart, exercise and carrots are good. Maybe they differ on the role genetics plays in all of it but that's it. Based on the expert knowledge I get from heart surgeons I am able to make an informed decision on ways to manage my body.
You know, it's not just laziness that keeps the voting public uninformed. It's the academics, and people who's nine-to-five job it is to master serious disciplines like history and science, not being objective about their findings that makes it very difficult to make an informed decision.
Howard Dean lost the Democratic nomination in '04 because his voice cracked in public. And you know it.
posted by Peter @ 8:53 AM
5 Comments:
Amen!!!!!!! You are right. As a journalist, I learned fast there are two sides to every story, and then there's the truth. I think the media is to blame as well for confusing the public because they give equal time to "each side." Cable news is a great example of that. Just two heads screaming back and forth at each other and we have learned nothing about the public policy issue at the heart of the debate. Sigh.
Lisa
"two sides to every story, and then there's the truth."--That's it, isn't it? I would study economics happily if there were 36 hours in a day instead of 24.
There is a saying among economists- if you put 100 of them in a room together you get 100 differernt opinions.
Economics, despite its fancy use of numbers and formulas is kind of a self-fullfilling proffecy (I can't spell proffecy, I'm not a fundy). You create the formula to give the result that you expect.
Just to get a little geeky on you, there are some Economists who are trying to turn it into a hard science by using things like brownian motion, stochastic calculus and econophysics.
Econo-whatsits?
"You create the formula to give the result that you expect." --and still they give these guys nobel prizes.
It's uniquely frustrating because it's the only political discourse that centers around hard data and yet it seems totally arbitrary.
Actually there is one more branch of politics that uses hard data- voting statistics. That is much less subjective (and why republicans are so good at squashing the vote- they know scientifically where to squash it)
But yeah- why are they getting Nobel prizes for fuzzy math?
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