Academic knowledge about economic policy is not just another opinion

Does the financial crisis reveal that economists are at the leeches and mercury stage of their subject, and as a result policy makers and the public have every right to ignore what they say? Does the fact that economists working in finance failed to recognise the prospect of a systemic crisis, and that macroeconomists both took finance for granted and as a result failed to investigate financial-real links, mean that we should ignore what economists say when it comes to Brexit?

Speaking for my own subject, I think the financial crisis does raise serious questions about the methodology macroeconomists rely on, as I have explained at length elsewhere. But does it mean that everything macroeconomists have learnt in the last 80 years is virtually worthless, or at least no better than the opinion of the average politician? Why don’t we look at what has happened since the financial crisis.

Macroeconomists, having learnt the lessons of the 1930s, immediately recommended that policy makers do three things after the crisis: cut interest rates sharply, embark on fiscal stimulus and bailout banks. Policy makers took that advice in 2009, and as a result we avoided another Great Depression. Many said that rising government debt was sure to send interest rates on that debt rising: academic economists using basic ideas from Keynes said they would not and they were proved right. Many others said that Quantitative Easing (central banks creating money to buy government debt) would cause hyperinflation, but again academic economists looking at more modern New Keynesian models said that was nonsense and again they were right.

You might claim that in all this economists were just advocating what was obvious. The acid test came in and after 2010, when fiscal stimulus turned to austerity. What evidence we have suggests this move was opposed by a majority of academic economists, a majority that grew over time. There was a minority that supported austerity, at least for a time, and they gained a lot of publicity because politicians latched on to what they had to say. But the majority followed both textbook and state of art economics, and this majority was right. The recovery would have been stronger and faster if politicians had gone with this majority.

If we look back before the financial crisis at UK macro policy, we can again look at the record of economics compared to politicians. The obvious place to start is with the 364 economists, who despite all attempts by politicians and think tanks to suggest otherwise were right: tight fiscal policy in the 1981 budget delayed a proper recovery by over a year. We can look at the following recession in the early 1990s. A key driver behind that was the UK joining the ERM at far too strong an exchange rate. Here it gets personal. With colleagues at the National Institute I undertook what was acknowledged at the time to be the most comprehensive analysis of the appropriate entry exchange rate, and we argued that our entering at the then current rate was folly. We were ignored, and as a result the UK was the first to be kicked out of the ERM in 1992.

The next time the UK had to decide to join in this case the ultimate fixed exchange rate regime, the Euro in 2003, it was the economics that persuaded the Labour government not to join. In this case macroeconomic analysis played a critical role in making the right decision.

All this suggests to me that macroeconomics, if we compare it with medicine, is well beyond the bloodletting stage. It would be very surprising if we were not, given 80+ years of study and the huge amounts of data now available. Of course that does not mean academic macroeconomics will not make mistakes, and of course unconditional forecasters of the kind you read about endlessly in the papers will always get things wrong: our own models tell us they will. But when it comes to macroeconomic policy, experience suggests you are much more likely to get economic policy right if you ask an academic macroeconomist than if you ask anybody else. [1]

The other key thing to say is that the discussion above has virtually nothing to do with the long term impact of Brexit, which depends on international trade. The key bit of analysis that means trade with the EU cannot be simply replaced with trade elsewhere are gravity equations. Gravity equations do not come from theory but from the data: countries are much more likely, even today, to trade with near neighbours than far away countries after allowing for other factors. So when Rees-Mogg suggests that the Treasury must have fiddled the numbers, when the government’s analysis confirms those of other studies that Brexit will be costly for all of us, we know he is slandering civil servants for his own political gain. That he is also the favorite to replace May as leader of the Conservative party tells you all you need to know about the current mess the UK is in and why it is in this mess.

Of course we do not condemn engineering science when a new bridge wobbles or an oil rig fails, and we do not say that all medical science is nonsense when medics get things wrong, as they frequently do. But with economics, there are too many people who either want to replace the mainstream with their own school, or who like Rees-Mogg want to discredit economics because they suggest his preferred policy is harmful. As a result, whenever economics does make mistakes, as it will, there will be plenty of people around who want to bury the whole discipline. But when you look at all the evidence and not just one observation, as economists are trained to do, you find that you are better off following the advice of academic economists when it comes to economic policy than anyone else.

[1] The argument that academic economists should be modest or humble when giving their views should be seen in this light. They should certainly be honest about their own views compared to their colleagues, and they should also if they are given the opportunity express the uncertainties. But being modest and humble should never mean leaving politicians unchallenged when they proclaim economic nonsense. 

Hitting back

Not a post about a certain byelection, but a reaction to reading this:

“A more serious incident was the forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK, which said last week that Brexit would have severe economic consequences. Coming only a few months after the economics profession discredited itself with a doomy forecast about the consequences of Brexit, this is an astonishing reminder of the inadequacy of economic forecasting models.

The truth about the impact of Brexit is that it is uncertain, beyond the ability of any human being to forecast and almost entirely dependent on how the process will be managed. “Don’t know” is the technically correct answer. Before the referendum, Project Fear was merely a monumental tactical miscalculation. Today it is stupidity. One of the debates was whether people should be listening to experts. We have moved beyond that. Because of a tendency to exaggerate, macroeconomists are no longer considered experts on the macroeconomy.”

Shrug your shoulders and move on? If it had appeared in the partisan press that would be a sensible reaction, but this was written by a widely respected journalist in the UK’s internationally renown financial newspaper. Furthermore - lest my motives be misunderstood - written by someone whose knowledge on the Eurozone is beyond dispute and whose views I often agree with. Well on this occasion this particular member of a discredited profession who is no longer apparently considered an expert on macroeconomics is not prepared to take this kind of stuff anymore, whoever it may come from.

It is difficult to know where to start with such apparent and complete ignorance. Nonsense expressed as platitudes. You can only make sense of “beyond the ability of any human to forecast” if you either think we know nothing about the impact of trade restrictions, which is false, or that forecasts are non-probabilistic. No journalist has any excuse nowadays for misunderstanding the probabilistic nature of forecasts (Bank of England fan charts), and any academic economist who knows anything about forecasting will tell you that unconditional macro forecasts are only slightly better than intelligent guesswork. They exist because it is worth being slightly better than guesswork when the stakes are so high.

You can also only make sense of these two paragraph if the writer is unaware or is just choosing to ignore the difference between conditional and unconditional forecasts. These are long words for a very simple concept. You would not dream of asking your doctor to forecast the number of times you would catch a cold over the next year (an unconditional forecast), but if you gave them all your relevant data they could probably make a better guess than your own. Their forecast would be probabilistic, but if you took the mean as ‘the forecast’ then in any particular year your doctor would generally be wrong. It would be absurd for you to then say that, having ‘discredited the profession with this inaccuracy’ you were now going to ignore their advice about how to avoid catching colds (advice based on conditional forecasts). But this is the logic of these two paragraphs.

As for a tendency to exaggerate, the simplest response involves a black kettle. But on this particular occasion I think there is a more honest response. In the Brexit campaign I felt the temptation to exaggerate (I don’t think I ever succumbed), because the media was failing to get the message from economists across. Our collective knowledge about the impact of trade restrictions was treated as just one more opinion, or described as Project Fear. When you are effectively being ignored you tend to shout louder.

But this is all defensive. Trying to explain yet again some basic economic ideas, and to be honest about what you can or cannot do and any failings you have. I’m just tired of doing this stuff over and over again, so it is time not just to defend. There are many good journalists out there, who when they write about macroeconomics do try to check with academics that what they are writing makes sense. (It was one of those journalists who drew my attention to the article I quote above.) It simply lets them down when others think they can write this sort of stuff without any of the kind of basic fact checking that journalists are supposed to do. It brings the profession of journalism into disrepute.

And they can only get away with it because academic economists only get a media voice by the grace and favour of journalists. If anyone should be doing some serious introspection after the Brexit result it should be journalists and the media. Warning of the dangers of trade restrictions was not a ‘tactical mistake’. What was a mistake was for journalists to allow those warnings, that knowledge, to be characterised as Project Fear, all in the name of ‘balance’ or cheap copy. But this was not a temporary lapse in an otherwise good record, but just another example of a growing tendency for the media to allow politicians to define economic facts and truths, a record I described in my lecture.

To have the nerve to blame economists for the Brexit result, to suggest that using their knowledge was a ‘tactical mistake’, to imply that the OBR should pretend they know nothing about Brexit, all that is itself amazing malevolent chutzpah. But it goes beyond audacity to criticise a profession and subject matter you appear not to understand when it is this lack of understanding that has contributed so much to the damage over the last few years.