Tim Harford: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there a higher implicit tax on popular economics today? Because the world has become more politically correct. People are more sensitive on matters having to do with gender, sex. And popular economics, in a sense, ignores those factors. You work through the model. It gives you an answer — may or may not be a correct answer, but it’s not necessarily what ordinary people would consider to be a moral answer. To put that forward in people’s faces — are we now living in a time where you can’t do it anymore? Or it feels in poor taste? It’s certainly changed. When you think about the best pop economics books before Freakonomics were Hidden Order by David Friedman — very, very good — and The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg — also very good. And they were . . . Particularly, Landsburg relished winding people up and being politically incorrect as part of his thing, and I think it’s still part of his thing, but that now sits less easily. But I wonder whether the real tax on popular economics is just that economists themselves have taken . . . The reputation of the profession has taken a real pounding since the financial crisis. When Freakonomics came out in 2005, you could plausibly say, “Hey, these economists are super smart, and they can solve any problem.” Much, much harder to make that case in 2009. So popular economic shifts, instead, to being Dan Ariely saying “The economists are wrong about everything, by the way, but here’s a new way of thinking about things. ” The nature of what popular economics is has changed, but the politicization, as well, of everything puts economist in a difficult position because, as any scientist who’s written about climate change or vaccines will tell you, people love scientists until they get into politically controversial territory. Well, for an economist, almost everything we write about is politically controversial, whether as with your book, Big Business, or whether we’re talking about inequality, whether we’re talking about GDP growth, the environment, taxation — it’s all politically contentious, and nobody wants to be told what to do when they’ve already made up their minds. I’ve read all of your books. I’ve read close to all of your columns, maybe all of them in fact, and I’m going to ask you a question I also asked Reid Hoffman. You know the truths of economics, plenty of empirical papers. Why aren’t you weirder? I’ve read things by you that I disagreed with, but I’ve never once read anything by you that I thought was outrageous. Why aren’t you weirder?…

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