Chris Johns
This post was inspired by a short but brilliant Substack piece written recently by Noah Smith. It’s essentially an essay with two big examples that illustrate a simple empirical observation: Experts do, sometimes, lie.
Smith acknowledges that it sounds extreme, even a somewhat ‘wild accusation’. But it is supported by the evidence.
His examples begins with a fib told by Anthony Fauci, the well-known American immunologist and advisor to every US president since Ronald Reagan. Fauci has said that the initial advice to the American public not to wear face masks was motivated by the desire not to cause shortages of very restricted supplies of PPE for front-line workers. The experts knew that face masks work but were keen to hoard supplies for medical staff. But, initially, they didn’t acknowledge that they do work, because of those fears about supply.
Smith says: ‘Nor was this lie the impulsive decision of a few rogue experts. It was systematic and came from the highest levels: Both the CDC and the WHO discouraged people from wearing masks’. Loony-toon mask sceptics were given all they ammunition they needed - beware unintended consequences of well-intentioned lies.
When I began reading Smith’s post, I guessed what his second example was going to be. It’s something that has bothered me since I was an undergraduate. The way some economists discuss free trade is often less than honest. Sometimes they just don’t tell the whole truth, sometimes it’s an outright lie.
Free trade is the one thing almost all economists seem to agree on. A casual reading of their pronouncements leads to the conclusion that free trade is always and everywhere a good thing. ‘Free trade equals everyone being made better off.’ What’s not to like?
The problem begins with the simple observation that free trade creates both winners and losers. We just don’t hear enough, in public discussion at least, about the losers. Some economists counter this by saying that if enough is done to use the gains from trade to compensate the losers, overall, everybody can still win.
While this is a theoretical possibility (not certainty) it simply doesn’t happen in practice. Just ask workers in the steel, coal, car and other industries that have lost their jobs to foreign competition. The losers from free trade make up a rather large slice of the ‘left behind’. There is a direct link here to the rise of populism, the rise of Trump and Brexit.
Harvard professor Dani Rodrik has been banging on about all of this for years. Appropriately, Smith quotes him at length: “Economists’ contributions in public can…look radically different from their discussions in the seminar room…in public, the tendency is to close ranks and support…free trade…[For example,] the most vociferous advocate of free trade in the profession, Jagdish Bhagwati, owes his academic reputation to a series of models that showed how free trade could leave a nation worse off.”
Rodrik’s explanation for this is that the economics profession doesn’t trust the public with the truth. If too much is made of the losers from free trade, the belief is that the public and their elected representatives will clamour for protectionism - a really big no-no that will make things worse, not better. They ended up there anyway with Donald trump’s trade war with China. So the lie, ultimately, didn’t work.
Smith suggests, plausibly, that experts on trade weren’t experts on ‘when to lie’. The outcome they feared came to pass anyway, despite their fibs designed to prevent bad stuff from happening. Arguably, a better outcome would have been achieved by telling the truth and coming up with alternative polices to help the losers from free trade and create, in an open and honest way, gains for everyone.
I’d like to add a third example. Lockdowns in countries like Ireland and the UK have not distinguished between the risks of indoor and outdoor activities. As soon as the pandemic started, research appeared showing that while being outdoors does carry risk, it is orders of magnitude lower than being indoors. Most lockdown restrictions ignored evidence which pointed firmly at enclosed, poorly ventilated spaces. Was the failure to tell the public about these very different risks a lie? It certainly led to restrictions that, to this observer at least, made little sense. The restrictions left me and many others with the impression that a game of tennis or a walk in the hills carries similar risks, in the eyes of the experts, as visiting a neighbour’s house. Yes, this was a lie.
Why did the health experts do this? In Ireland, they have been caught out by the recent evidence from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) which says that 0.1% of 232,164 cases of Covid in Ireland were caught outdoors. In response, various health experts have chosen to spin rather than deal with the obvious questions raised. One leading expert described the data as ‘misleading’ because outdoor activities can lead to people being indoors. Really.
These remarks were revealing. They suggest we cannot be trusted with the truth. Rather than telling us about the different risks, the experts chose to restrict all indoor and outdoor activities.
We were told to avoid everything because we cannot be trusted to behave ourselves. Such tactics reveal, as with Smith’s description of economists, experts not very well equipped at fibbing. When caught, they spin. And the consequences can be dire, worse than the ones the experts originally feared.
Proper health messaging should involve telling people the truth - the whole truth. The different risks of indoors vs outdoors should have been hammered home and the restrictions tailored accordingly. We should have been told that a game of golf or tennis is fine, provided we socially distance, don’t use changing rooms and walk or cycle (or drive alone) to the venue. And don’t visit each others homes afterwards. But the experts didn’t trust us. They treated us with contempt.
Could the health outcome have been better if we had been treated with respect and told the whole truth? If people are treated badly, by governments in particular, they often ‘misbehave’.
The experts have revealed their lack of trust in us and now risk their own erosion of trust. Once someone is caught in a fib, why should we trust what they say next? Lies, even ones of omission, often have big, unintended consequences. We deserve the truth and we deserve to be trusted.
Thank you for your articles and podcast. They are a refreshing alternative. On a related note, I'm not sure if it's 'lies' in the classic sense, but I stunned by the debate (or lack of) on mandatory hotel quarantine for EU and the USA. Talk about biting off the hand that feeds. Why would FDI look at right Ireland now over other European alternatives. What about all of the non nationals we employ in our FDI and domestic sectors. May of these have gone home now, and can work from home, during the lockdown (who could blame them). They have no incentive to return. If we want to go back to a butcher, baker economy then MHQ is the way to go. The public are being whipped into a frenzy by the opposition and been beaten from pillar to post. Parts of the media are equally culpable. IBEC, ISME, IDA / EI and others are eerily silent. So many young, educated foreign people make Ireland a unique and attractive place. We will be paying the price of this for many years to come. Our tax rates are already under threat and now we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Gone are the days we being an English speaking country gave us a unique advantage. In recent times, I have rarely met anyone under 40, with half an education, in the EU that does not speak English.
The Irish Government do not trust the population to behave in a sensible and rational manner in the face of an emergency. This is understandable in the context of Golfgate when it was apparent that they cannot be trusted themselves. In turn the Irish population will both comply and act out in the manner of teenagers who aren't trusted to stay home alone. It's more a stupid than a vicious circle but one that needs to be addressed and I commend you for doing so here. This cycle needs to be broken and a start would be a thorough inquest into what went right and wrong in the handling of this pandemic. Also necessary because we are being warned that this will not be the last. Great read again Jim and Chris.