Admin message Xmas 2019

Hello fellow Wordly Explorers

We've taking a short break from posting to consider the blog, what we might keep doing, what we might change, to talk with some interested writers, and also to have a little refresh. 

If you're taking a break now too, we hope it is full of wonderful words. 

Economist - a word that requires an adjective

The journalist was interviewing the Prime Minister about a government proposal for boosting jobs. The proposal had no modelling, no risk analysis, no costings - no detail in fact. 

Would you trust them? Source

She asked him how he knew the program would work without any of this basic groundwork being completed.

She asked, 'Why should the Australian people trust your word?' 

'Well’, he replied, 'because I am an economist, Leigh.' 

In the political fog that makes it difficult to find facts and detail, this comment struck me as particularly alarming. I think the prime minister thought he was providing a genuine and satisfactory answer. 
 

Why is economics a matter of 'trust'?

It's not any sort of answer actually. It just raises a whole lot of questions.

When a politician justifies their view by saying they are an economist, does that mean their views are correct? What expertise are they claiming? What gives an economist authority to comment on the hugely complex society of a country? Why does the prime minister think that an individual economist can forecast the outcomes of fiscal policy, even without doing any modelling? (And I have to add, can the prime minister even claim to be an economist? Studying a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in geographic economics - a subfield of geography - and then never working in the field hardly makes one an economist. But then, that's probably the least pressing of the questions I have about this field.) 

Let's start at the beginning: what is an economist anyway?

TATKOP 117

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who think that gender is socially constructed and those who don't know what social construction is.

See more in the TATKOP series.