Such letters are often theatrical versions of political position papers rather than any attempt to educate the public.
T he Trump administration made its case in court last week that the president has the right to fire sitting Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook because of ethical misconduct on her mortgage contracts.
It shouldn’t be controversial to argue that someone who has committed mortgage fraud should be disqualified from serving on a board that has oversight over mortgage policy. But more than 500 academics have rushed to Cook’s defense by signing a letter stating that she should stay on the job.
Really? These academics are so ideologically chained to the left — or hate Trump so passionately — that they don’t see an ethical violation here? They act as though mortgage-application fraud — a major cause of the 2008 housing-market collapse — is akin to having overdue books checked out at the library.
In 2021, Casey Mulligan and Tomas Philipson, two economists who were fellows at Unleash Prosperity, detailed the dismal record of fact-free group opinions signed by economists supporting Joe Biden’s economic policies.
These experts’ “open letters” predicted that the federal student loan program would make money for the government, that Obamacare would dramatically reduce health care costs, and that redistribution and using more costly energy sources would increase economic growth. Dead wrong on all counts.
It seems every day brings another “open letter” from a group of economists or other experts weighing in on some political issue. Last year, 23 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics endorsed Kamala Harris’s tax and spending plans over those of Donald Trump.
Such letters are often theatrical versions of political position papers rather than any attempt to educate the public. That’s no surprise, because they often come from highly liberal, tenured professors who, shocker alert, oppose all conservative policies.
Many of the experts who sign open leaders have clearly not read the bills they comment on. Their opinions are often outside their area of expertise, which is like having your psychiatrist perform heart surgery. And having largely left-wing professors comment on Trump is like having Coke comment on Pepsi.
In the run-up to Britain’s successful 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, Britain’s Justice Secretary Michael Gove touched a populist nerve when he broke with his own Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and backed Brexit. After being told that expert opinion was predicting a collapse of the British economy if Brexit passed, Gove replied, “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
The “experts” were naturally furious at his comments, but Gove spoke for large swaths of the population who had come to distrust experts. They had become skeptical specifically of economists who appeared unable to come up with forecasts that turn out to be even roughly right. After Brexit passed, there was no recession in Britain; indeed, there was not even a slowdown in growth.
Richard Portes of the London Business School admits that “the reputation of experts has suffered because they are seen as reinforcing the elite: as the elite has come under attack from populist quarters, so experts have suffered the same fate.”
Experts who publish in academic journals insist that their research standards are more rigorous than the general public believes. They say their papers go through peer review, a process by which submissions to academic journals are scrutinized by academic peers of the authors — the “referees.” Only papers deemed suitable by referees are published.
But the process is riddled with problems, errors in how referees are selected, and conflicts of interest. Once a paper is published, the chances of its being subjected to further scrutiny are remote. So, all too often, there is no post-publication challenge by anyone affiliated with a university, and no one from outside has the ability to challenge the findings. No wonder many people view the “experts” as a secretive priesthood that plays a rigged game with the facts.
There is no easy solution to the problem of so much “expert” opinion being viewed as “junk science.” But a start could be made by those experts who worry that their standing in the broader community has taken a hit. One way to build back some of that lost respect would be for experts to resist the temptation to comment outside their area of direct expertise. Someone who pledged to do just that might start earning a reputation for exercising . . . expert judgment.