How much?

In economics, the question is often not: is this view correct? but rather: how significant is this?
I was reminded of this by Patrick Minford on the Today programme. He argues that the overshooting of the inflation target is dangerous because it could lead to higher inflation expectations.
This view is not wrong. Instead, the question is a trickier one: how do we weigh the cost of higher inflation expectations against the alternative cost, which is that a tighter monetary policy would have deepened the recession?
And this is the sort of question that arises in most economic policy issues. For example, unlike some lefties, I’m happy to concede that, in theory, higher minimum wages, greater job protection, tougher planning laws and the like depress employment. The question is: to what extent do they do so? Would freer market policies in these areas really reduce unemployment much?
What I’m saying is that economics is a quantitative discipline*. But this runs straight into Stephen Pinker’s complaint that a “failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.”
The problem here is not that economists aren’t statistical thinkers. A comparison of, say, the Economic Journal and BMJ will show that economists are often more statistically sophisticated than many natural scientists; they have to be if they cannot conduct experiments. Instead, the problem is that economics gets misunderstood by journalists and hence the public.
That interview with Minford highlights three (of many?) reasons for this:
1. Time pressure. Interviewees typically have only a few seconds to state their position. But it takes longer to explain statistical results. The typical item on More or Less, a programme that does explain statistics, lasts longer (I suspect) than interviews or news items in lesser programmes.
2. The adversarial mode encourages binary yes/no thinking. Minford’s views are juxtaposed against those of John Gieve. This encourages the impression that either one or the other is right, or that economists don‘t really know what they‘re talking about. But I suspect if Gieve and Minford were to talk away from the mic, they would exchange empirical evidence about the scale of the competing costs.
3. Incentives. Even in a radio studio, no-one has an incentive to proportion their beliefs to the evidence; it makes for bad (that is, dull but truthful) radio. And this is - of course - still more true in politics; those campaigning for, say, easier planning laws have incentives to overstate their case. 
In these ways, even apparently “neutral” media serve a pernicious function. They perpetuate bad thinking and (what might or might not be the same thing) a misunderstanding of economics.
* This is not to say that the quantitative methods must always be very sophisticated. I suspect there are diminishing returns to econometrics once we go beyond Peter Kennedy’s interocular trauma test (pdf).

Comments

[Boursin]

No comments so far, so I thought I'd just say that I agree with this. The neglect of this cluster of phenomena is staggering in relation to its importance.

I was really depressed by both the ferocity and the self-congratulatory gleefulness of the attack on Pinker on Crooked Timber, which has traditionally been my favourite blogs. It was something viscerally repellent, really. I tried to write a comment there, but was in the end too depressed to do even that. That your attitude to him is different is itself a breath of really fresh air. Another reason for this nearly content-free comment is that I wanted to thank you for expressing that attitude aloud, if only in passing.