A chara, – Richard Tol may be correct in his view (Opinion Analysis, May 9th) that celebrity economists might not be the best to look to for advice on policy issues.
It does not necessarily follow, however, that economists with a high academic standing will be any better in this respect.
For a start, to suggest that high levels of peer citations are attributable solely to academic excellence is to ignore the significant role which fads, fashions, bandwagons and social networks play in the practice of academia. Furthermore, much of the theoretical literature in economics has little relevance to the real world, never mind the realms of government policy.
In this respect, it is ironic that the economist in Richard Tol’s list with by far the highest number of scholarly citations and the lowest number of media citations is James Markusen (of UCD). Writing in 1995, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, about the so-called “new trade theory” which had assumed growing importance in economics over the previous two decades, Markusen suggested that the policy analysis emanating from this theory might be “significantly off base”.
This was because new trade theory generally excluded from its analysis the large – and especially multinational – firms with multiple plants and multiple products which dominate many key areas of international trade (and which, of course, are of crucial importance to the Irish economy).
To include these in the analysis, according to Markusen, could “radically” alter the policy implications.
Markusen wrote that this omission was “potentially troubling”. If the academics who made this omission were to be asked to advise on economic policy (particularly in Ireland), the phrase which more readily comes to my mind is “potentially disastrous”. – Is mise,
Richard Tol would be better employed criticising these people rather than attacking McWilliams. Brian Lenihan’s mistake in September 2008 was not in talking to the dissident McWilliams, as Tol suggests, but in not talking to more dissidents, especially Morgan Kelly. The generality of Irish economists appeared to believe what their equally right-wing colleagues in the US and UK only affected to believe, ie that the markets can never catastrophically misprice assets. We are all paying a high price for their collective delusion. No matter how often they cite each other in obscure publications, they have, with a few honourable exceptions, failed the country. – Yours, etc,