Economists Should Do More to Fight Misinformation

Knowledge is a real thing

Scholars have spent a great deal of time thinking about the dangers of misinformation. While this concern has sometimes been used as an excuse to censor legitimate viewpoints, any fair-minded observer looking at the proliferation of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience over the last decade must recognize that what they are worried about is in fact a serious problem.

I am somewhat sympathetic toward the misinformation researchers. Their field rests on the fundamental principle that, as the famous lawn sign reminds us, “science is real.” Of course, the practice of combating misinformation can be abused, just like any effort to claim power in any area of life. But what’s the alternative? Let whatever lunatic who does booking for Joe Rogan determine what most people believe about contentious topics? Or maybe the TikTok algorithm?

Yet while climatologists, virologists, and political scientists care a lot about false information regarding topics they study, economists seem to be missing in action. To check my intuitions, I searched for “economic(s) misinformation” on Google Scholar and received 107 results. In comparison I got 1,530 results for “climate misinformation,” 1,650 for “covid misinformation,” and 11,300 for “vaccine misinformation.” I asked ChatGPT if there were other phrases I could search for to get at the same idea, and it recommended a few like “economic misperceptions” and “economic disinformation,” but this didn’t change the results.

This is a strange state of affairs, given that:

1. Perhaps no field is more relevant for the choices individuals make as citizens and voters than economics.

2. Economic misinformation is rampant.

The state of the economy is often listed as the number one issue voters care about. And, unlike some topics like abortion and immigration, most people are pragmatic about various economic approaches. They tend to care about results more than ideology.

One objection to targeting economic misinformation might be that economists disagree with one another too much to come to agreements regarding which beliefs are false. Yet economics is like any other field, in that while there are disputes within the community, there are propositions that practically all experts hold. As Bryan Caplan writes in The Myth of the Rational Voter,

There are numerous surveys of the economic beliefs of both economists and the general public. They broadly confirm the "wide divergence" with which Newcomb maintained “all are familiar.” Take the case of free trade versus protection. A long-running survey initiated by J. R. Kearl and coauthors has repeatedly asked economists whether they agree that “tariffs and import quotas usually reduce the general welfare of society.” In 2000, 72.5% mainly agreed, and an additional 20.1% agreed with provisos; only 6% generally disagreed. The breakdowns for 1990 and the late 1970s are even more lopsided in favor of free trade.

What about the public's views on this matter?…

The public always leans decidedly in favor of protection. Support for free trade bottomed out in 1977, when only 18% sympathized with eliminating tariffs, and 66% thought they were necessary. But public opinion remains protectionist in absolute terms. In 2002, sympathy for ending tariffs reached a historic high of 38% – versus 50% who took the opposite view. Furthermore, 85% of the respondents that year held that “protecting the jobs of American workers” should be a “very important” goal of foreign policy – an all-time high!

If antiforeign bias really exists, these are the patterns you would expect. Comparable evidence can be marshaled for the other biases explored in the last chapter. Take antimarket bias. In the late 1970s, Kearl et al. asked economists whether “wage-price controls should be used to control inflation.” Almost three-quarters of economists generally disagreed. In contrast, the General Social Survey (henceforth, GSS) reports that solid majorities of noneconomists think it should be government’s responsibility to “keep prices under control.” Those who agree outnumber those who disagree by at least 2:1 and often 3:1. Casual empiricism and formal empiricism are in sync. Economists trust competition; noneconomists want government to leash rapacious businesses.

This book was published in 2007. Here’s a poll from 2012 of a few dozen economists in which not a single one thought free trade made Americans worse off. In 2016, 90% of economists said that letting in more immigrants with advanced degrees would raise per capita income in the US over time, with 6% uncertain, and 0% disagreeing. One might object to the wording of the question, as it could have instead asked about the impacts on Americans already born here. Allowing in people who earn higher than average incomes might simply raise per capita GDP by adding those workers to the population. But I don’t think the answers here depend on the exact word choice, given that poll respondents were allowed to leave comments, and some shared exactly what they were thinking.

MIT economist Richard Schmalensee noted that “if that's not right, almost all of economics is wrong.” Austin Goolsbee simply says “See under ‘History, American.’” Some noted that there are losers who might need to be compensated. But nobody left a comment saying “I’m only agreeing with this statement because the new migrants have high incomes, while the effects on American natives are neutral or negative.” That would be an obvious thing to note if this was the position held by any of the respondents.

An overwhelming majority also agreed that high-skill immigration would reduce the premium earned by American workers with similar degrees at least in the short term. Yet among those who agreed, several left comments that the effects would probably be small and temporary. Even here, 17% were uncertain, and 4% disagreed. Overall, the consensus position among economists is that high-skill immigration is good for American society. There’s a weaker consensus that it is bad for some subset of the population, but that is seen as a relatively small and temporary problem even for them. When Senator Eric Schmitt tells the National Conservatism conference then that skilled immigrants are destroying the economic prospects of American children, he is spreading false beliefs in the same way as a public figure talking about the dangers of chemtrails.

Another place where economists and the public diverge is on the costs of housing, one of the most important challenges facing society. A recent poll showed that only 24% of Americans believed that building more housing in their communities would reduce prices, while 44% thought it would raise them. This is plain flat earthism. Yet elites never accuse NIMBYs of spreading misinformation, like they do when public figures deny global warming or the idea that vaccines work. The common thread here is that economists trust markets a lot more than the public does.

One of the dangers of policing misinformation is that experts may use their credentials as a cover to sneak in their values. Yet we try to manage this in other areas of life. We say people who deny vaccines work spread misinformation, and that is true. But someone who argues that individual liberty considerations suggest we should not mandate vaccines is not spreading misinformation, even if we may disagree with them. The lines are in practice hard to draw, since anti-vaxxers will often justify their opposition to vaccine mandates by citing scientific concerns that they are simply misinformed about. Nonetheless, we need to find a way to strike a balance, and I think it is a good thing that scientific journals and the mainstream media don’t platform anti-vaxxers and their arguments.

We can have a similar approach to economics. One can prefer a more or less equal society. You can want to favor citizens over foreigners, and debate the extent to which that is appropriate. But there should be a taboo on saying things that are simply false, like raising the housing supply won’t reduce costs, there is no connection between the amount of money in circulation and inflation, or that Americans don’t become much better off as a result of high-skill immigration. Economists should point to their credentials and status as experts in their field to say such beliefs are simply not true.

When a serious newspaper is covering the statements of a politician who thinks vaccines cause autism, it will note his claims before informing the audience that they are without merit. This drives conservatives up the wall, because they often believe false things, but this is what responsible journalists should do. Yet false economic beliefs are rarely treated in the same way. I don’t think that it’s because there’s much less certainty about the laws of economics. There has been enough data, and the theories underlying mainstream economics are so strong, that we’ve reached on many questions what has to be considered an adequate level of scientific certainty. We simply know that a lot of commonly made arguments by regular people and politicians about the way that the economy works are simply false.

Why do economists seem not to be as into fighting misinformation as scholars in other fields? In part, economics draws a disproportionate share of intellectuals who are actually interested in discovering new knowledge. Many academics go into sociology or political theory seeing themselves as activists, and policing misinformation is a natural extension of their political role.

But there are also partisan factors at work here. A 2003 study showed that members of the American Economics Association were two and a half times more likely to support Democrats than Republicans. A more recent review found that among those working for the Federal Reserve, Democratic economists outnumber Republicans ten to one. A few things should be noted here. First, the partisan split among economists should make you more likely to accept that the pro-market positions that practically all economists agree on are actually correct. It’s like if biology departments were overwhelmingly filled with Evangelical Christians but they all had to admit that Darwinian evolution was true. I have my criticisms of the field, but they’re in a direction that makes sense, as I think economists are not pro-market enough. For example, I can’t understand why there isn’t universal hostility among economists to labor unions. But given their political tilt to the left, it makes little sense to suspect a bias towards pro-market positions. Sometimes it is argued that the bias is towards markets themselves, but each effort to create an alternative view of economics that fundamentally breaks with the assumptions and norms of the field, from Marxism to the recent rise of MAGA Maoism, has failed miserably.

The partisan commitments of economists help explain why they’re not too excited about correcting misinformation about their field. Doing so would involve spending a lot of energy attacking the left. To be fair, they do this occasionally, as when Bernie Sanders released his budget in 2016 and liberal economists pounced. And when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, I saw a lot of the same energy. This is good, but we need more of it. There should be at least as much effort going towards combating economic misinformation as there is taking on anti-vaxx and climate change denial.

I wish that elites of all types would conceive of themselves less as members of a tribe in red/blue terms and more on the side of reason, and when individuals have relevant expertise, they should use it to defend the knowledge that has been produced by their field. In practical terms, this would mean attacking economic illiteracy no matter where it comes from on the political spectrum. In addition to individuals adopting different attitudes, we could benefit from the creation of institutions devoted to combating economic misinformation. Truth is valuable for its own sake, but the benefits it can bring to the world will always be limited by the degree to which it is drowned in a sea of ignorance. For readers who are passionate about economics as a field, I would suggest that popularizing what it has already learned about the world may be a more useful endeavor than placing another small brick in the edifice of human knowledge.