How do you access unbiased expertise: follow the money?

Anyone can claim to be an expert nowadays. How do we tell real experts from fake experts, and what does that even mean? And even with real experts, how do we tell which are the ones we can trust and which are telling you what they are paid to tell you? These are big questions, but I want to look at what seems like an increasingly popular method of judging whether expertise is biased, and that is to look at who funds the experts.

There are clearly occasions when this method makes sense. A medic who promotes a drug who receives income from the company that produces the drug, for example. You would also be right to be suspicious about any think tank that is not transparent about the sources of its funding, such as Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Centre for Social Justice, Civitas, Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange or the TaxPayers’ Alliance. It is not clear to me why the broadcast media gives a platform to think tanks that do not disclose who funds them.

However when various academics and research institutions produced analysis suggesting negative long term effects from Brexit, some suggested that we should treat this finding with suspicion because they received EU research funds. I have also seen the IFS described as tainted by the fact that it receives some corporate income. In fact the IFS can be accused of being in hoc to all kinds of vested interests. When it published a report estimating that Brexit could lead to a increased budget deficit of £20-40bn, Vote Leave dismissed the IFS as a “paid-up propaganda arm of the European commission” because it received funding from the European Research Council (ERC). But it actually receives more funds from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which is funded by the UK government, so by the same logic it is a ‘paid up propaganda arm’ of the UK government.

The IFS example shows the danger of taking a naive approach to linking funding to positions taken. The idea that funding from the ERC or ESRC should influence the position taken by the IFS is absurd. Government research funding is dispersed through organisations like the ESRC in part to ensure that money is given to researchers on their merits (as judged by other academics) rather than because researchers might please the current government. Because the IFS is essentially an academic research institute there is no way that who funds any research (directly or indirectly) would influence the outcome of that research. If that started happening, the IFS would begin to lose its academic reputation and therefore its core funding from the ESRC.

This point is also true of academia as a whole. However being part of academia or a professional body does not preclude a pecuniary influence on any particular academic or groups of academic’s opinions, as our example of a medic funded by a drug company illustrates. When it comes to economics an even greater problem than money may be ideological or political bias. That means, unfortunately, that you cannot rely on every academic economist to give you a reasonable idea of where the consensus or plurality of opinion lies. And you cannot rely on finding some monetary link to indicate how much you can trust a particular academic economist.

So how do the public tell when views from economists can be trusted as genuine results of expertise and research untainted by bias due to money or ideology? It is a question that is increasingly asked, but I remain surprised that more people do not point to an obvious answer.

The solution to this problem is to use polls of experts to find out if a consensus on an issue exists. There are already some regular polls of selected academic economists (interest declaration: I am part of the CFM surveys of macroeconomists). Here is the latest IGM poll showing that not a single one of the 40+ panel members think imposing new US tariffs on steel and aluminum will improve Americans’ welfare. These polls are one reason I can claim that most economists do not support austerity. (Guess who was the only IGM panel member that did not think the Obama stimulus reduced unemployment.)

Invaluable though these polls are, they are selective, and a journalist or member of the public cannot be sure that the selection method did not bias the result. I have argued in the past that it would be in the profession’s interest for professional national bodies like the Royal Economics Society (RES) or AEA (American Economics Association) to conduct polls of its own members themselves. The pre-referendum Brexit poll is an excellent example of what could be done, but it was commissioned by the Observer newspaper and not the RES. I remain unclear whether this thought has occurred to either institution, and if it has why it has not led to action. Until it is done, the absence of such polls as a resource means academics cannot really complain when individual overworked journalists take insufficient account of true expertise. [1]

[1] An important caveat here. The existence of such polls is a necessary but not sufficient condition for journalists to acknowledge expertise: see the BBC's treatment of Patrick Minford's Brexit analysis, and ignoring the polls that already exist on issues like austerity and Brexit.  

Brexit and Corbyn: how our media fails the people

For every academic economist that thought Brexit would benefit the economy, 22 thought the opposite. That is as near as unanimous as you are ever going to get among economists. It is certainly a consensus. The BBC failed to get that message across during the referendum campaign. Instead, because of their policy of balance, they gave people a completely different message.

How could they have acted differently given their balance policy? Easily - by simply quoting the 22 to 1 figure every time economic issues came up. I am told they did sometimes, but sometimes is just not good enough, just like telling the truth occasionally will not do. I cannot say for sure that the BBC’s policy and inaction swung the vote, but over 40% of voters continue to believe they will be better off after Brexit.

The Royal Economic Society wrote angry letters, but they were brushed aside. Since then the government has produced their own analysis of the consequences of Brexit, and it is very similar to what economists said before the vote. But you would not know that from the BBC’s commentary on Brexit. In their ‘one year to go’ coverage I saw lots of talking from politicians and members of the public, but nothing was said about the economic consequences of leaving. No experts anywhere in sight.

The Prime Minister was also touring the country for the cameras last week. She did interviews. I saw two, with the BBC and ITV. In both she talked about being able to spend more money because we wouldn’t have to pay “year in and year out” the “vast amounts” we currently pay into the EU. That is simply a lie and she knows it. The Chancellor looks to the OBR to tell him how much money he has to spend. You may not like that system, but it is how things work in the UK at the moment. The OBR believe the Chancellor will have around $15 billion a year less to spend as a result of Brexit (source, p249).

When a politician lies so openly and so obviously, it is any serious journalist’s duty to recognise that fact in some way. The easiest thing to do in this case is to say ‘but PM. the OBR says there will be no Brexit dividend, and in fact …”. But on both the occasions I saw the lie was allowed to pass. Henry Porter makes a similar observation. In what way are viewers who may be looking to broadcasters for reliable information on Brexit served by this indifference to truth. It is, quite simply, the media’s job to expose politicians when they lie.

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I have talked before about antisemitism in the Labour party. Contrary to what many members say, I think it is a particular problem for Labour members because of the Israel Palestine situation, and I also personally think implicitly arguing that Israel should not exist as a state is antisemitic.

But it is also true, unfortunately, that those who oppose Labour, or Labour as it now is, will use this problem as a means to attack Labour by exaggerating it. A classic example came in a poll that the Times commissioned from YouGov. Labour party members were asked which of these three statements most chimed with their view.

1. It is a serious and genuine problem that the party leadership needs to take urgent action to address (19%)
2. It is a genuine problem, but its extent is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle criticism of Israel (47%)
3. It is not a serious problem at all, and is being hyped up to undermine Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. (30%)

The numbers in brackets are the percentage replies (the rest said Don’t Know). Journalists at the Times interpreted this as “Less than 1 in 5 Labour Party members believe antisemitism is a genuine problem that needs addressing”. Not 30%, which is worrying enough, but according to these journalists 80% of members do not think antisemitism within the Labour party is a serious problem.

Choosing to interpret the results in this way showed that reply (B) is in fact correct. The way the poll is phrased implies (B) is (A)+, not that (B) is different from (A), still less than choosing (B) implies you do not think antisemitism is a genuine and serious problem that needs tackling. On twitter I did come across some people who wanted to argue otherwise, and thereby exogenerate the Times journalists. One told me that answering (B) was malinging Jews. I was rather shocked by that, as I would have answered (B). The reality is that antisemitism in the Labour party is a genuine problem but it is being exaggerated to attack Corbyn. Labour party members should care about both and therefore answer (B).

That the right wing press plays fast and loose with polls and facts more generally is normal, unfortunately. What is much more worrying is when the BBC does the same. When a notorious right wing blogger broke the news that Corbyn had celebrated Passover seder at the invitation of his local Jewish organisation Jewdas, the BBC led with it as a major story. Other Jewish organisations suggested that by accepting this invitation Corbyn was not serious about dealing with antisemitism because, according to the BBC, “Jewdas has previously suggested anti-Semitism claims were right-wing smears.” That statement, unqualified, is at the top of the website’s story at 3pm yesterday. Much further down the story is a statement from Jewdas saying “Let's make something clear: we do NOT believe accusations of antisemitism in Labour and the left are nothing more than smears.” Here, from 2014, is its guide at how to avoid antisemitism, which presumably it would not have posted if it thought antisemitism claims were just right wing smears.

This is just another version of the (A) or (B) problem above. The BBC through their reporting are explicitly judging that an organisation of the left like Jewdas are not serious about the left’s antisemitism problem because they dare to say that the problem is also being exaggerated to attack Corbyn. Either that of the BBC decided it was more important to follow a story from a right wing blog than first check out the facts about a left wing Jewish organisation, and then ignore the facts anyway. I find it quite shocking that the BBC should do this.***

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Bias in the right wing press is obviously important: it gave us Brexit. The right wing press is almost always anti-Labour, and it is difficult to judge whether being even more anti-Corbyn makes that much difference. The exception is 1997, of course, and at least two studies (here and here) suggest that had a large positive effect on the Labour vote.

It is the broadcast media where I think we find specific bias against Corbyn. There are some who say that if you accuse the BBC as being biased against Corbyn you ‘have lost the political argument’. On the contrary to suggest this reflects the kind of false centrism that I complained of here. I am no Corbynista: I wanted Owen Smith to win the 2016 Labour leadership election. I doubt if a former chairman of the BBC Trust is a Corbynista either, but he talks about “extraordinary attacks” on Corbyn. Academic research suggests the BBC is biased against Corbyn, and how the bias can be subtle in a way other broadcasters are not.

I think Ivor Gabor gets it right here.The BBC does have a bias, and it is to the consensus or centre as it sees it. A key reference point to where the BBC sees the centre is Westminster. As many Labour MPs are unhappy about Corbyn’s leadership, that means Corbyn is outside the consensus and therefore subject to BBC bias against him. The cue for the BBC to ‘follow the story’ from press attacks against Corbyn is invariably whether attacks come in part from Labour MPs. The BBC did not follow the ‘Corbyn was a Czech spy’ nonsense, and Andrew Neil effectively demolished it here, but where Labour MPs did criticise Corbyn over the Salisbury attacks and antisemitism, the BBC has happily followed the story pursued by the right wing press. [1]

There clearly is a real story over antisemitism. But in the case of the BBC we do not have balance. At the time of the London mayoral elections the prime minister at the time falsely accused an innocent member of the public, who had visited No.10, as being involved with the Islamic State. It was part of a blatantly Islamophobic campaign again the eventual victor, Sadiq Khan. But you would not know that from the BBC’s coverage. There was no discussion of the Conservative Party's Islamophobia problem. [2]

In addition, when it comes to antisemitism, some of the most worrying developments must be what is currently going on in Hungary. There the government has set up George Soros as almost the country’s No.1 enemy, and it is no coincidence that Soros also happens to be a rich Jew. So when May’s ex-adviser in the Daily Telegraph described Soros as “a rich gambler … accused of meddling in nation’s affairs” who was part of a “secret plot” to thwart Brexit, that should have rung antisemitism alarm bells. It did in the Guardian and some other media outlets, but the BBC didn’t follow that story? Instead they covered the Telegraph story as the Telegraph did.

In the case of the Salisbury poisoning, Corbyn was more cautious in attributing blame to Putin than most of parliament. It was a tactical error in political terms. He would have done better to have followed parliament in accepting Putin’s guilt, and focused on why Putin felt emboldened to do such things: could it have anything to do with May’s reluctance to hold an inquiry into the Litvinenko killings, or the rather expensive tennis match between Conservative ministers and oligarchs linked to Putin. Because of his error and the anti-Corbyn bias in the media the story became him instead. But a minor tactical error in parliament does not seem to equate with lying about the Brexit dividend, which May gets away with completely. And it now transpires that Corbyn asked questions which the media failed to ask.

Just as it is obvious the BBC and to a lesser extent other broadcasters have a Corbyn problem, it is also obvious that this matters a lot. Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour party, so criticism of Corbyn hurts Labour. As Justin Lewis argues here, the Labour surge in 2017 clearly shows what can happen when this bias is reduced because of election campaign rules. I have talked about how a media filter that slants the news against Labour normally applies, but this filter was removed during the final weeks of the election campaign. Who knows what the 2017 result would have been if this filter had been removed earlier. We have seen this filter in action over the last few weeks.

The problems within the BBC and perhaps other broadcasters over Corbyn also apply to Brexit. (The problems at the BBC over Brexit seem worse than for other broadcasters such as Sky News. Chris Grey has an excellent account of how that can be.) At best, it may be that what the BBC considers as a consensus comes from Parliament, and both main parties support Brexit. As with Corbyn, this is the wrong reference point. Polls suggest that nearly half the country supports Corbyn’s Labour party, and a majority thinks Brexit is a mistake. The BBC needs to stick their heads out of the Westminster bubble and start focusing on the concerns of the country as a whole.

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One final personal point. This post is not about macroeconomics but media bias. Am I abusing the title of my blog? Only one of two will form the main party in the government after the next election. One of those parties has a sensible macroeconomic policy that I played a very minor role in helping to create, and the other has followed a policy that is refuted in first year economics textbooks and has as a result lost the average household resources worth £10,000. The same party seems to be controlled by politicians and others who would happily inflict even greater economic harm on the UK for the sake of their ideology. Economists are always criticised for not seeing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is if you want sensible economic policies you need to ask why extremely harmful policies have been implemented since 2010.

***Postscript (05/05/18) The BBC have admitted they made a mistake at the top of this report. (HT @patrickamon)
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[1] Corbyn supporters sometimes tell me that dissent within Labour justifies attempts to deselect MPs precisely because the media panalises dissent. I would prefer to keep dissenting MPs, and change how the media works.

[2] Another problem is that the BBC’s finances are too easily influenced by the government of the day, so it is inevitable that the BBC will be reluctant to pick fights with the government.

The media and Attitudes to Austerity

One of the important features of austerity introduced into the UK from 2010 onwards, at a point when the economy had not shown any significant signs of recovery, is that it was popular. Indeed, as many people appeared to blame the previous Labour government for the need for austerity as the Coalition government actually implementing it, because the deficit had increased while Labour had been in power.

If we acknowledge, as we should, that austerity was the wrong policy to pursue, and that it had harmful effects on everyone (an average loss of around £10,000 per household according to my most recent estimate), why was this policy popular? Many people would argue that the macroeconomic case for fiscal stimulus was complex, while simple analogies between governments and households were easier to grasp. However I have also argued that the media played a large role in focusing on the latter and largely ignoring the former.

This is the issue addressed in a new paper by Lucy Barnes and Timothy Hicks in the American Journal of Political Science. (For those that cannot access this, here is a slightly earlier version.) They measure attitudes towards austerity on a simple scale, and then relate that attitude to party support and newspaper readership jointly.

The lower bars show that, for people with no party affiliation, attitudes to austerity were very different for Guardian readers compared to, say, Telegraph readers. In other words, a LibDem voter who read the Telegraph would be more hawkish about the deficit than one that read the Times. There are two explanations for this finding. The first is that how the newspaper was reporting issues around the deficit influenced readers. The paper verifies that the Guardian and Telegraph did report these issues in very different ways. The second is that readers choose their newspapers based on their attitudes to the deficit. This seems unlikely (remember these effects are over and above party affiliation), as austerity was a relatively new issue.

Nevertheless, the authors tried an experiment where it showed different groups a short text about the deficit, which differed in only one paragraph. A control group did not see the paragraph, a ‘Guardian’ group saw text which suggested that austerity might not be necessary, and a ‘Telegraph’ group saw text suggesting it was. Immediately after reading the text, each group was asked about their views about the importance of reducing the deficit.

The Guardian group (those that had read the Guardian type text) did indeed think austerity was less urgent than the control group. However those that had read the Telegraph style piece, which drew parallels with Greece, were no more pro-austerity than the control group. The paper notes that “a generally anti deficit discourse would result in little difference between control and ‘Telegraph’ groups, as indeed we find.” In other words the pervasive media discourse was pro-austerity, and so reading a pro-austerity text made no difference to people’s attitudes. Being exposed to Keynesian ideas, in contrast, did influence people.

So this research suggests two things. First, how the media presents issues like austerity matters because it influences public attitudes. Second, it suggests the general media climate in the UK was pro-austerity, and exposing people to Keynesian arguments could change their attitudes. The general media climate goes beyond newspapers, and includes broadcasters like the BBC. This suggests broadcasters were giving voice to an austerity agenda and deliberately excluding a Keynesian perspective. Which might be excusable if Keynesian economics and consequent anti-austerity views had been a fringe preoccupation, but in reality it was the view of the majority of academic economists. It seems broadcasters had become tired of experts long before Brexit.

Is Trump about race and Brexit about culture?

The initial reaction to the Trump victory was to look at the Rust Belt states that swung the result to Trump, and as a result to talk about the economically left behind (as a result of automation or globalisation). Since then there has been a number of pieces of analysis that have appeared to show the opposite, which is that the Trump victory was all about race. This piece in The Nation by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel is a good example.

This debate has its exact counterpart with Brexit. While a lot of focus has been on how those voting in areas left behind by automation or globalisation tended to vote Leave, others have argued that the vote is really about cultural values. For example Eric Kaufmann notes how attitudes to the death penalty are a very good predictor for voting Leave.

The evidence from studies of Brexit for a ‘left behind’ effect is essentially geographical, as I discuss here. This corresponds with Rust Belt swing states for Trump. However McElwee and McDaniel use a different measure in their analysis, designed to pick up economic anxiety (worries about job security, mortgage payments etc). They show that while measures of racial resentment or animosity (among whites) are clearly correlated with Trump’s vote, measures of economic anxiety are not, as the RHS of the figure below shows.

They conclude on the basis of this that it was race, not economics, that won the vote for Trump.

However I think the chart above suggests a rather more nuanced conclusion. As the authors note and as shown on the LHS of this figure, high economic anxiety decreased the probability of voting for the Republican Romney in 2012. That is what you should expect. For those in economic difficulty the Democrats are more likely to bring in helpful measures (like more universal health care) than the Republicans. What Trump managed to do was negate a relationship between economic anxiety and voting Democratic that we would otherwise expect to see.

You can see exactly the same phenomenon with Brexit. Brexit is essentially about economics, because at heart it is about leaving a free trade area. To achieve that free trade requires some joint decision making, but I have yet to find a Brexiter who could tell me anything of significance that had been ‘imposed by Brussels’ that they were unhappy with. In that sense, the problems highlighted by Dani Rodrik’s famous trilemma were not critical: the UK was not giving up any sovereignty that really mattered to achieve free trade.

Except, of course, for freedom of movement. Attitudes to immigration, like the death penalty, is a pretty good way of sorting social conservatives from social liberals. But immigration as an issue can do more than that. If you can convince voters that they will also be economically better off by restricting immigration, then you satisfy their economic concerns as well. This is why immigration is such an attractive issue for the political right, particularly if you can shut out all those annoying experts who keep saying immigration has economic benefits rather than costs. That is how the Leave campaign could convince half the population that they will be better of leaving the EU, when almost every economist thinks the opposite.

What the Leave campaign managed to do was make a vote about an economic issue into one about a social issue, and as a result the vote split along the social conservative/liberal axis. McElwee and McDaniel, among others, show that Trump achieved much the same. Because he promised various measures, from immigration controls to restrictions on trade, that were designed to appeal to the economically anxious and the left behind, he negated the natural tendency of those groups to vote Democrat. And as with Brexit, no economist thinks these measures will actually help anyone. 

This helps explain an apparent paradox that might already have occurred to you. How can Trump’s victory be all about race, when before Trump we had the first ever black President who was re-elected for a second term? The answer was that a traditional Republican campaign was not prepared to deflect economic anxieties with building walls and erecting barriers to trade, so many in the rust belt put aside any racial animosity and voted for Obama. In contrast Trump was prepared to do this, so the racial issue dominated. 

That the economic promises made by Trump and Leavers are just a sham can lead to a regressive dynamic that I examined here. How can more progressive parties actively try and stop that happening and win back control, rather than simply hoping the right are rejected by the electorate? I suspect just explaining why immigration control or trade restrictions will not work will not be enough when we have a media that avoids providing expertise. It has not worked with Brexit. 

The answer may be to fight fire with fire, if the UK 2017 general election is any guide. Labour did not win that election, but in a three week period it staged an unprecedented advance to take away May’s majority. It did that by offering clear economic benefits for various groups, paid for by reversing previous corporation tax cuts and increasing taxes on the wealthy, as well as promising a substantial increase in public investment financed by borrowing. A lesson, perhaps, in how to deal with right wing parties that use populist policies to deflect economic concerns.

Postscript (01/04/2018) Here is a link to a tweet thread from Jason McDaniel commenting on this post.