When confronted with evidence that conflicts with either our ideology or
our stance as policy advocates or just our past claims on how the world
works, people on all sides of those divides find ways to dismiss it or
explain it away. Krugman claims he is a Keynesian who favors fiscal
stimulus because the evidence is convincing. But there are Nobel Prize
winning economists or of similar quality who find the evidence
unconvincing. How does that work? How can both sides find the evidence
convincing?
We are all prone to confirmation bias, interpreting the events of the word and sophisticated econometric studies as all on our side. I think government regulation is too intrusive. Does that explain the mediocre recovery from the Great Recession? Convenient for my worldview as an explanation, but very unproven. Is there evidence? Sure, but it is nothing close to decisive. It’s just a correlation. This is a problem that afflicts all parts of the ideological spectrum. An honest economist should concede that the world is a complicated place and that teasing out causality or the impact of one variable on a massively-complex economy is a fool’s game.
Nassim Taleb calls it the narrative fallacy, the tendency we all have to construct a consistent narrative by emphasizing some aspects of the world around us while ignore others. Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The elephant is our heart, the rider, our mind. The elephant usually goes where it wants but it is not so hard for the rider to convince himself after the fact that that was indeed the direction he was headed all along.
(From an article by
We are all prone to confirmation bias, interpreting the events of the word and sophisticated econometric studies as all on our side. I think government regulation is too intrusive. Does that explain the mediocre recovery from the Great Recession? Convenient for my worldview as an explanation, but very unproven. Is there evidence? Sure, but it is nothing close to decisive. It’s just a correlation. This is a problem that afflicts all parts of the ideological spectrum. An honest economist should concede that the world is a complicated place and that teasing out causality or the impact of one variable on a massively-complex economy is a fool’s game.
Nassim Taleb calls it the narrative fallacy, the tendency we all have to construct a consistent narrative by emphasizing some aspects of the world around us while ignore others. Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The elephant is our heart, the rider, our mind. The elephant usually goes where it wants but it is not so hard for the rider to convince himself after the fact that that was indeed the direction he was headed all along.
(From an article by
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