‘Experts’ have been so wrong on just about everything
It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time
By Adam Creighton THE AUSTRALIAN JUNE 23, 2022
It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time. Think Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation.
Intelligence experts looked foolish when it turned out Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction after all.
The Queen took a dim view of economists, who failed en masse to foresee problems in the world’s banking system that precipitated the global financial crisis in 2008.
Economists have a long history of being wrong, at least since more than 300 of them publicly warned Margaret Thatcher in 1981 that the British prime minister’s belt-tightening policies would cause a recession, only to be proved spectacularly wrong a few months later.
But the decade beginning in 2020 appears to have taken institutional wrongness to a higher plane. Economists, even after the embarrassment of calling inflation “transitory” for most of last year, are still at it; they wrote a public letter in September last year playing down concerns about inflation and encouraging Joe Biden to press ahead with his $US3.5 trillion Build Back Better package. But with inflation at almost 9 per cent in the US, supporters of the package have gone strangely quiet in recent months.
Foreign policy experts, though, have given economists a run for their money since Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the US and Europe to wallop Russia with unprecedented sanctions designed to compel Vladimir Putin to stop his illegal invasion.
They fired a bazooka at their own feet, doing nothing to avert the war while crushing the competitiveness of European industry and slashing the living standards of ordinary Americans and Europeans. Goodbye German car industry, on current trends.
It’s worse, though. In late March Biden, under the advice of experts no doubt, said Russia’s currency would be turned to “rubble” by sanctions. This week the rouble reached a seven-year high against the US dollar, becoming the best performing currency in the world this year.
Interest rates on Russian 10-year government bonds, at about 9 per cent, are one percentage point lower than they were before the war. The Russian central bank is cutting interest rates as the Fed lifts them.
Soaring energy prices, as a result mainly of Western sanctions, have supercharged Russian oil and gas revenues, quadrupling the Russian government’s budget surplus in May compared with the same month a year ago, as Putin gloated in St Petersburg last week.
Security and intelligence experts haven’t done much better, routinely foreshadowing the collapse of Russian forces, or even the imminent death of Putin from a variety of diseases, all while those forces appear to have slowly occupied a fifth of Ukraine, including the crucial land corridor between Crimea and Russia.
Perhaps these are the same US intelligence experts who in October 2020 publicly said they were convinced the files on Hunter Biden’s laptops, which have since raised serious questions about the business dealings of the US President’s family, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. Perhaps, but it was also entirely real, as similarly benighted media experts have now conceded.
Then there’s the climate change and energy experts who have been telling us for years a rising share of solar and wind power in national grids would cause prices to decline, when the two nations furthest down that path – Germany and Denmark – have the most expensive power in Europe. Batteries would continue to get cheaper, the experts told us, seemingly oblivious of the impact an immense increase in mandated demand for electric cars and giant lithium batteries would have on the price of the critical minerals they require. Not very smart.
But no group of experts can compete with epidemiologists and other so-called public health experts for being so militantly and repeatedly wrong about every aspect of their supposed speciality, which will go down as one of the great fiascos of history.
Three weeks to flatten the curve turned into almost 850 days of chaotic, arbitrary restrictions that appeared to do very little in the end to stop the spread of Covid-19, let alone pass any sort of rational cost-benefit assessment.
Cloth masks worked, then they didn’t; vaccines protected against infection, then they didn’t. Two doses were enough, then three, then four. The virus emerged zoonotically for certain, then it didn’t.
“Experts say”, “experts warn” has become something of a joke. It’s not surprising that less than a fifth of American parents, for instance, intend to vaccinate their toddlers against Covid-19, according to a recent Kaiser Foundation survey, even though experts are recommending it urgently.
This false narrative of a consensus among experts risks damaging public respect for all of them. That’s a pity because genuine expertise is valuable.
The handful of people presented by the media as experts are a sliver of the total, among whom there is rarely a true consensus on anything. Social media has supercharged the incentives to moralise and fall victim to groupthink. On top of that, expert ranks have swollen as society has become richer, enabling more people to think for a living.
That means the average quality of advice has declined, providing the media with a greater number of potentially crowd-pleasing, dubious opinions to promote. Experts get it wrong often because they bear few personal consequences of their advice. The accuracy of past predictions or assessments is rarely checked. For experts, it’s much more important to be on the right side of the debate than to be right. Most of all, experts’ incomes typically are guaranteed whatever they say; others bear the consequences.
The past few years have been a crisis for the reputation of experts, but not for experts themselves.
ADAM CREIGHTON
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
Adam Creighton is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in tax and financial policy. He was a Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2019.
Original article here
SPIEF2022: CEO of Russia's largest oil producer Rosneft, Igor Sechin, delivered his keynote speech:
🔺 The global economic crisis is gaining momentum not because of sanctions, but exacerbated by them;
🔺 Europe 'commits energy suicide' by sanctioning Russia;
🔺 After exhausting sanctions against Iran, Venezuela and Russia, the US can go after their own companies;
🔺 Russia with its energy potential 'is Noah's Ark of the world economy';
🔺 BP announced its withdrawal from Rosneft, but it is still a shareholder and shows its willingness to stay and survive the crisis without any real losses;
🔺 US accusations of Rosneft's participation in supplies of Iranian oil to Europe are absolutely unfounded and groundless;
🔺 Sanctions against Russia have done away with the green transition, as it is no longer needed to manipulate the market.
#energy #oil #ceo #economy #europe #sanctions #russia
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:6945266544499126272/
Among the highlights of the St Petersburg 2022 International Economic Forum, Putin smashed the illusions of the so-called ‘golden billion’ who live in the industrialized west (only 12 percent of the global population) and the “irresponsible macroeconomic policies of the G7 countries.”
The Russian president noted how “EU losses due to sanctions against Russia” could exceed $400 billion per year, and that Europe’s high energy prices – something that actually started “in the third quarter of last year” – are due to “blindly believing in renewable sources.”
He also duly dismissed the west’s ‘Putin price hike’ propaganda, saying the food and energy crisis is linked to misguided western economic policies, i.e., “Russian grain and fertilizers are being sanctioned” to the detriment of the west.
In a nutshell: the west misjudged Russia’s sovereignty when sanctioning it, and now is paying a very heavy price. #energy #food #europe #inflation #renewablesenergy #wef2022 #stpetersburg2022
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-st-petersburg-sets-stage-war-economic-corridors
Mark Steyn speaks to Vikki Spit whose fiancé died after having the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine.
Vikki will become the first person in the UK to receive a Covid vaccine damage payment of £120,000, GB News can exclusively reveal.
VIDEO (FROM 14 MINUTES ON)
Just so full of gratitude that evil didn't outsmart everyone. Thank you for being a light in the darkness, Steve.
Ignorance definitely isn't bliss...especially when they've decided you're expendable.
Peter Woit wrote an interesting physics book called "Not Even Wrong" by which he describes theories so flawed that experimental results are so unreliable they can't be used to prove or even disprove the theory. It's a common human failure to elevate popular notions to religious zeal. They rarely rise to causing 6 million deaths, though, as they have with covid orthodoxy. Successful people listen to experts but don't rely on them.