Scrapbook for April

07.04.2025 – Beware the expert class

The last decade has reminded us – if we ever needed a reminder – that trusting experts is foolish, especially if we are having to cope with more than one of them.

The 'climate emergency' bandwagon was always going to be a bust, yet it is still expensively trundling on despite all the wheels having falling off a long time ago. And it is only now acknowledged that the COVID panic did much more harm than good. And now along comes the Trump Tariff Disaster.

In the TTD the role of the experts is taken by economists, who are a particularly dangerous class of expert. Economics cannot claim to be a science, despite all its cod maths and even codder charts. The plain fact is that there is almost nothing in Economics on which all economists agree – even major points are still disputed. There are many 'schools' of economists with quite different explanations for economic phenomena. For any question about, say, interest rate levels, government debt or exchange rates, you can rely on receiving as many fundamentally different answers as the number of economists asked. Believe none of them, but best of all, don't ask for their opinion in the first place.

Compare this with Physics, that most sciency of sciences. At the frontiers of research there is, of course, rigorous controversy, but the core of the subject is perfectly coherent and generally undisputed. We are not going to open a newspaper and read 'Newton's Laws of Motion Disproved – World to End NEXT WEEK!'. If Physics were like Economics there would still be a faction siding with Ptolemy's geocentric solar system, others preferring Copernicus' heliocentric model, a group of flat-earthers and heaven knows who else.

Note that the epidemiologists who made everyone thoroughly miserable during the COVID panic are really just economists at heart. The ship of fools calling themselves climate scientists have only one skill: dressing up suppositions as proven facts. Economists, epidemiologists, climatologists all rely on 'mathematical models', which present wild guesswork as fundamental truth.

We are not advocating tumbrils at dawn, but some radical Muskian de-funding would benefit us non-experts. Failing that, the only remedy is to ignore all experts completely, which we all can do in the privacy of our own lives.