Mar 21, 2017 7:22pm
The President Undermining Economic Data Is No Laughing Matter
forbes.com
Adam.
THREE POINTS TO HELP:
1) He uses this strategy all the time, He did it through the campaign. He did it prior to taking office. And he has continued to do it since taking office: “Say what the base thinks, and cause the media to justify its possition thereby educating the people.” In this way he talks to his base, who understands exactly what he is doing, and avoids putting the press in control of the discourse.
I’m not the only person who has been putting this forward, dozens of others have.
2) One of the other techniques he makes use of is that conservatives speak in hyperbole in order to accentuate the conservative intuition to treat all moral statements under the Kantian Categorical Imperative: what if everyone did that, or what would be the consequences of a lot of this happening? (The intuition of the conservative time preference).
3) As someone who has spent a few decades now working on performative truth (and what we refer to as the scientific method), I think many of us in the population are desirous of putting the shoe on the other public intellectuals foot so to speak, and changing to where we actively interrogate the state, academy, and media. If for no other reason than the misuse of statistics, and the misrepresentation of nearly all ‘reserach’ in the social sciences and psychology.
Even within that discipline of economics, I find it trivially easy to demonstrate that almost every measure we can find constitutes cherrypicking and does not fully account for the changes in various forms of capital, and the cost of doing so. Isn’t economics of growth de-facto cherrypicking?
Anyway. On behalf of the public I prefer that politicians prosecute the academy state and media. Because those of us out here in the fields (little think tanks included) are clearly not able to do so in sufficient numbers.
Cheers
