Experts and Non-expert Experts

As a professor, much of your identity is wrapped up in how people see your profession or discipline of study. Much of this might come from a value judgement made during a survey course the person took in undergrad or the TED talks listened to while the individual worked out.

Economics is special because it suffers from the attention of almost everyone. Diana posted on Sunday that Krugman has two persona, the nobel-winning economist who pushed out the frontiers of the science, and the NYT columnist. It is this latter character that we encounter in the campus community and that I encounter when talking with my family. During the 2008 election cycle, I actually tried to talk to my family about the economic issues. They looked at me dumbfounded and said: Isn't there a consensus in your profession? Why would you disagree with the nobel prize winner?

Diana focuses on the political nature of this, but there is something really banal about expertise. Non-experts remain resilient to economic arguments in the face of a real-live economic discussions rehearsed live in face-to-face contact. I can only assume that Diana and I are unconvincing as experts.

The one thing that the process of education has taught me is that nicely wrapped packages of ideas in academics should be avoided like the plague. Anything which appears simple is deceptively so. The industry of wrapping complex ideas into sound bytes is one that I begrudgingly accept as permanent. How do we then deal with the popular wisdom of our profession? It is unlikely that a physics professor encounters people remaining confident about some of the cutting edge research in string-theory despite being told that they are omitting a key argument. Even if I have watched 200 TED-talk like summaries of string theory I am likely to defer to the expert on matters of physics.

Why is that different in Economics?

The difference appears to be the normative content of economics. The string-theory implications that would destroy much of the European enlightenment consensus in science are small shock compared to that which the economic rhetorician encounters on a continual basis. Economics can be used to justify almost anything. There are as many arguments as there are people, not only because preferences matter, but because the facts are diverse enough and people lean on statistics for almost point they would like to score in a political debate. Do you think that growth would be higher if we had spent twice as much on road construction? There is an economist that has rate-of-return figures to back you up. Do you think that government spending is wasteful vis-a-vis private infrastructure development, just search the web for papers on that and contact your expert. Seeing that these are not contradictions but compliments means that you are thinking like an expert, not an opportunist.

It takes a practitioner of economics to point out the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments. The practitioners for hire, the public intellectuals, are certainly there simplifying the issues and removing the necessary complexity for the consuming public. But just like the history professor that Diana encountered, this false confidence gets you something rather dangerous. When non-experts confuse these public intellectuals with the authority of a decided professional opinion and start to spread this misinformation, we have a responsibility to reinforce the lesson of ambiguity. Paul Krugman and TED talks are no substitute for actually studying a subject. It seems that in the later case we are more willing to learn the lesson.