Some concrete proposals for economists and the media

You can now listen to my SPERI/New Statesman prize lecture in full here, or even watch it all here. The talk looks at recent UK history, involving austerity and Brexit, to argue that there are serious problems in how the broadcast media treats economics. [1] The two main problems I talk about are exclusion and balance. Exclusion, where academic economists are simply ignored because they are not part of the Westminster bubble, can lead journalists to assume statements made by politicians are true even though an economist knows they are false or at least highly questionable. I give a number of examples in the talk, including after the 2013/14 floods where Cameron said there had been no cuts in flood prevention when there clearly had been cuts. Balance is where a view that represents a consensus among academic economists is treated as just another opinion, to be balanced by the opposite view. This simply devalues knowledge. The costs of Brexit is a clear example.

Solutions to these problems must start with academic economists themselves. It is asking too much to expect journalists to know whether a view put forward by an economist represents a consensus among academics or an idiosyncratic view. An obvious way to remedy this is through regular, topical polls of as many academic economists as possible. (I prefer this approach to sampling selected academic ‘leaders’ for reasons I may discuss in a later post.) The example I have in mind was the poll of Royal Economic Society members undertaken by the Guardian during the Brexit campaign. What these establish is whether a consensus exists or not on key issues. They are much better at doing this than letters to newspapers.

The reason why this is far better than getting more academics on programmes like Newsnight (not that I have any problem with that) is that it can then prevent the problem of balance. I use in the talk the example of climate change to show how the broadcast media could treat a consensus view among economists (90% or more agreement) as knowledge, not as simply an opinion to be balanced against another. Getting the broadcasters to do that will not be easy, but academics first need to remove the objection that journalists cannot know what economic knowledge is. Our target audience should not be Newsnight but the 6pm or 10pm news programmes, which may be the only non-partisan news that readers of the right wing press ever see. We need political correspondents to routinely say what the economic consensus is, and use it to interrogate politicians when they deviate from it.

Economists could learn a great deal from the physical and medical sciences on how to use collective pressure to ensure media policy is changed. Climate change is the obvious example where the media began to treat knowledge as just contested opinion (because that is the media’s preferred format), but it was changed as a result of pressure from the scientific community, working through existing institutions that represent scientists. This can be effective not just with the big ticket issues like Brexit, but also where an individual piece of research is misrepresented in the media.

Only once this pressure is brought to bear on the media will we see the media begin to improve its own capability in the area of economics. As I note at the end of my talk, the BBC trust recently commissioned a report on the use of statistics, and most of its recommendations could equally well be applied to economics. To achieve that requires pressure and help from economists as a collective.

The broadcast media should be a defense against populism, not the means by which populism takes hold. If you treat knowledge as just an opinion, of course people will vote for whatever sounds good to their ears. Let’s cut government spending: we should all tighten our belts. Let’s keep immigrants out so there will be more jobs for natives and better access to the NHS. As I explained in my lecture, this was not just a problem involving the EU referendum: because the broadcast media accepted the Conservative narrative on austerity by excluding the views of the majority of academic macroeconomists they helped them win an election. [2]

The referendum story is far from over: key decisions on issues like the Single Market have still to be made. We cannot expect people to make sensible decisions about these issues if expertise on these issues (not just economic, but legal, constitutional etc) is kept locked away in specialist programmes they will never see, or ignored altogether. We must stop allowing politicians to dictate what is knowledge and what is just an opinion.

[1] The lecture and this post are about the UK. Although the general points I make about expertise are universal, my specific recommendations only apply to a broadcast media that is not under government control and is regulated to prevent partisan broadcasting. Although my knowledge of the US is far less, it seems to me the problems there are deeper still, particularly now we have a POTUS and Congress who show no respect for truth.

[2] Someone asked me recently what had gone wrong with the media, but as I say in my talk this problem has been there for decades (see this post on Jay/Birt in the 1970s). What has happened is that, because of underlying social and economic trends, and simply because politicians have learnt how to play the media, media rules that kind of worked when politicians played by the rules and respected truth fall apart when they do not.

Populism and the media

Don’t just ask why people are disenchanted with elites, but also why they are choosing the alternatives offered by snake-oil salesmen.

This could be the subtitle of the talk I will be giving later today. I will have more to say in later posts, plus a link to the full text (the writing of which distracted me from writing posts over the last week or two), but I thought I would make this important point here about why I keep going on about the media. In thinking about Brexit and Trump, talking about the media is not in competition with talking about disenchantment over globalisation and de-industrialisation, but a complement to it. I don’t blame the media for this disenchantment, which is real enough, but for the fact that it is leading people to make choices which are clearly bad for society as a whole, and in many cases will actually make them worse off. They are choices which in an important sense are known to be wrong.

Many will say on reading that last sentence that this is just your opinion, but in a way that illustrates the basic problem. Take Brexit. We know that erecting trade barriers is harmful: the only question is whether in this case it will be pretty harmful or very harmful. Some of this is already in the process of happening, as the depreciation reduces real wages. We also know that erecting barriers against your neighbours is extremely unlikely to be offset in any significant way by doing deals with countries further away. This is knowledge derived largely from empirical evidence and uncontroversial theory and agreed almost unanimously by economists.

The moment you reduce it to just another opinion, to be balanced by opposing opinions, as happened in the broadcast media during the Brexit campaign, you allow that knowledge to be ignored when critical choices are made.

A snake-oil salesman is not a perfect analogy, because those championing populist causes often have something to work on that makes some sense to the not very knowledgeable voter. [1] It could be the idea that immigration reduces access to public services, for example. But our media should help people avoid adopting solutions that are known to be wrong, rather than assisting the process by devaluing knowledge. For example, they could continually point out that most economists think EU immigration puts in more resources for public services than it takes out. 

There is another way the media can mislead, by establishing politicised truths, which I will discuss later on. Let me end with a link to a SPERI blog post I wrote to coincide with the talk. It is about the role of neoliberalism in the rise of populism. Although it draws from some of the points in the talk, it is quite separate. I basically argue in that post that a story that recent events like Brexit or Trump are a consequence of neoliberal ideas is potentially a mislabeling, because pushing globalisation is essential a liberal rather than a neoliberal idea. Instead I offer two concrete ways in which neoliberalism, and its emphasis on shrinking aspects of the state and deregulation, did indeed help bring about Brexit and Trump through austerity in the UK and deregulation of the broadcast media in the US.

[1] Postscript 24/11/16 Actually the analogy is better than I thought: see this great post from Chris.         

Explaining macroeconomics to the Swabian housewife

Matthew Bishop has a nice simple post at SPERI suggesting how the ‘economy is like a household’ idea can be tackled. He is correct that this analogy has tremendous power, to the extent that I doubt we would have seen so much UK austerity without it. He uses an exchange between Yanis Varoufakis and a member of the Question Time audience to suggest that attempts to simply explain the economics are ineffective. He suggests that the “problem, as Jonathan Hopkin and Ben Rosamond have suggested (here and here), is that you cannot fight ‘political bullshit’ with facts”.

I want to make some observations, in ascending order of importance.

1. I think he is right that economists can usefully point out that households do not always balance their budgets. But all the examples he gives help explain why it may make sense for the government to borrow to invest. Indeed he could have added comparisons between governments and firms in this respect. That is why it is easy for economists to now argue that governments should be borrowing more to invest. I’m sure most economists would use exactly these analogies: after all most do try to teach this stuff.
   
   
2. However these analogies do little for the issue the audience member thought we were dealing with. He thought the analogy was exactly the case of spending too much on excessive drinking, and needing to sober up financially. While the examples Matthew quotes get you over the simplistic idea that governments should never borrow, they do not explain why (a) it is OK in principle to keep the ratio of government debt to GDP constant (governments live forever), and (b) why it makes sense for governments to borrow a lot more in a recession (the automatic stabilisers), or even (c) why the government should go out of its way to borrow even more in a recession when interest rates are at the Zero Lower Bound. We can try and get these ideas across as simply as we can, as I have tried many times (and suggestions on how to do it better are always welcome), but it is very difficult to do so in a minute or two on Question Time. It is sufficiently difficult that before the General Theory it was not understood by most economists.
   
   
3. I think the suggestion that economists are too busy trying to be correct and therefore too scornful of simple analogies is a little unfair. Only a little: in a live public appearance there is always the concern about what your colleagues in the department will say afterwards. Economists are also aware, as Chris Dillow points out, that partial analogies used in one context can easily backfire in others. However I doubt very much that most economists do the equivalent of mocking “every grammatical error made by friends practising their holiday Spanish”.
   
   
4. The big difference between economists and scientists at CERN is not that economists are less respectful of lay people’s mistakes. It is (a) they have politicians repeating false analogies about their subject as if they were facts, and (b) large sections of the print media doing the same, and (c) most of the rest of the media too clueless to challenge these falsehoods.
   
   
5. This is why, for an evidence based discipline like economics, the response ‘economists know that the economy is not like a household in important respects and here is why’ is not at the end of the day arrogant or dismissive. If Brian Cox was asked on Question Time ‘what is all this about the Earth moving: it is obvious that everything moves around the Earth’ we would not blink an eyelid if he replied ‘No, scientists know that is not true and it only seems that way to you because..’.
   
   
6. What austerity tells us, just as the climate change denial tells us, is that in today’s world respect for science is fragile. In the US public opinion about climate change is sharply divided along political lines, despite the near unanimity among scientists. It is this that should really worry us, and not how climate change scientists can better communicate with the public, desirable though that might be in itself. A world where the scientist has to compete on equal terms with the ignorant polemicist is not a healthy world.

What are ABC to do?

This is quite a long piece about politics, that I suspect no one will like. I have said before that I depart from my comfort zone of macroeconomics when I think an important point is being missed from the public debate. In this case the second sentence may follow from the first.

What should the strategy be for the great majority of Labour MPs who did not vote for Jeremy Corbyn (ABC=anyone but Corbyn)? They can continue to expound their misery to receptive political journalists. They can continue to stand aghast at the dislike that some now in power hold for their predecessors. But for a group that has lost two crucial elections within the space of a few months, they really need a more positive focus.

Tony Payne, director of SPERI at Sheffield University, has a suggestion which I think has a great deal of merit. They should “come to terms fully, properly and honestly with Labour’s record in government under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010”. This is not in some kind of masochistic, ‘what we got wrong’ kind of exercise, but rather to recognise what that Labour government got right. I was part of a group of academics that looked at economic policy under Labour, and the sense I got was that there were an awful lot of positives to note. But in looking at the negatives, one point that should be recognised is that these (e.g. Iraq, not enough banking regulation, perhaps not enough local support for inward migration) did not come from any tendency to be too populist. Instead rather the opposite.

I’ll come back to that in a second, but actually I decided to write this in response to another post by Tony Payne, which could perhaps be described as a lament for the centre-left. You can get the flavour from this passage:

“what underpins and ultimately characterises centrist politics (whether in its left or right variant) is a rejection of what I see as the easy moral simplicities of populist politics in favour of the complex, awkward and often unsatisfying and unsatisfactory world of governing, of trying to find the best way through the most difficult problems, even if that involves compromise. The latter is of course the dirtiest of words in the lexicon of the populist left (and right).”

I think that speaks to where a lot of the ABCs are right now. They say we tried to be sensible in the face of difficult problems, but we were outflanked on both sides by the moral simplicities of populist politics. I suspect (and to be fair Tony Payne does not make this link) it also passes as some sort of explanation as to why ABC lost two elections. They were the realists who lost out to the idealists and populists. As an explanation I think it is completely inadequate, and to be frank comes close to denial.

Let me take my own subject as an example, partly because austerity is also central to much else. In the end what quite a few of the ABCs wanted to do was to junk the complex and perhaps awkward truths of how to run a sensible fiscal policy in favour of the populist politics of talking about the nation’s credit card. Osborne’s fiscal charter is not supported by a single economist I know, but many of the ABC’s have advocated supporting it. In this case what those ABCs have been doing is adopting - or at least flirting with - populist politics, but the popular politics of the right rather than the left.

That in turns comes from what seems to be the dominant mantra of the ABCs, which is that only they are serious about trying to win elections. That is why, we are told, they have to adopt the populist policies of the other side, because only that way can they win. Notice first how different this is from the noble Weberian concept of the centre that Tony Payne puts forward. Notice second that these populist policies seem to come from the right rather than the left: whenever there is a populist policy from the left (like renationalising rail), then it becomes time to cast aside populism and be ‘sensible’.

I have struggled to understand what is going on here. But the thought that I keep coming back to is regulatory capture. This is the idea that the regulators of an industry become captured by the industry itself: by its objectives, values and methods. In some cases the reason for capture is straightforward (revolving doors), but in some cases it reflects the fact that regulators cannot match their industry in terms of knowledge and analysis. My idea is that in this case instead of an industry you have a Westminster discourse which, under the coalition, was dominated by the thinking of the centre-right. Most Labour MPs simply didn’t have the time or resources to find alternatives to this, and gradually became hostage to this discourse. As Paul Krugman might say, after a time all they hear are the views of Very Serious People.

Part of this Westminster discourse involves the tactic of exclusion for individuals and ideas that are deemed to be outlandish. (Outside the Overton window, if you like.) I have experienced that on a personal level recently: imagine a biologist being told that they would be ‘branded’ if they gave technical advice to a major political party!? Rather more important it leads some politicians on the centre left with strong skills and expertise reluctant to sit at the same table as those in their own party with more radical views, even when those holding more radical views have every incentive to seek compromise. You have to ask who benefits from this.

It is often said in politics that voters vote for and against incumbents, not oppositions. I doubt very much if Labour party members voted for Corbyn because they had suddenly become converted wholesale to a Bennite type platform. Instead they voted against what the parliamentary party had become. I think recognising their responsibility for their own failure is the first step to recovery. I said that the ABCs would do well to follow Tony Payne’s advice and focus on what the Labour government did right. One of those things was the regime of tax credits, which cut poverty and made it easier for people to work. They might then reflect on the reasoning, forces and processes that led so many of them this July to abstain on the bill that cut those credits.

The centre left needs to retrace its steps as a first stage to recovery, and learn from the many things it got right when in government. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe it is important this happens sooner rather than later. Hopefully in doing this it will rediscover positive virtues and ideals that go beyond simply a negation of populism. I strongly suspect a strong political centre (left or right) is vital for good governance, and that both the UK and Europe is suffering from its absence.