President Barack Obama talks on the phone in the Oval Office, Aug. 13, 2010. National Economic Council Director Larry Summers listens in on the call. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Unethical experts abound in every discipline, but no more so perhaps than in the media and DC think tanks, warns Victor Davis Hanson in National Review.
A supposedly clueless Donald Trump had the lemmings racing toward the abyss in an attempt to trash his economic plans as gravely absurd. Mr. Trump was bound to destroy the economy, the experts scolded.
- Paul Krugman: The Nobel Prize winner insisted that Mr. Trump not only would crash the stock market but also suggested that stocks might never recover.
- Larry Summers: The former treasury secretary envisioned a recession within a year-and-a-half, thanks to Mr. Trump’s being elected.
- Steven Rattner: The former head of the National Economic Council predicted a market crash of “historic proportions.”
“Yet, three years later, in terms of the stock market, unemployment, energy production and workers’ wages, the economy has been doing superbly,” VDH reminds us.
The point of these sharp contrasts is not that an Ivy League degree or a Washington reputation is of little value, or that prestigious prizes and honors account for nothing, or even that supposed experts are always unethical and silly.
Instead, one lesson is that conventional wisdom and groupthink tend to mislead, especially in the age of online echo chambers and often sheltered and blinkered elite lives.
Read more here.
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