The examples around terrorism undermine the article. Anyone paying attention, presumably including politicians, knows why Islamic terrorists want to attack the

The examples around terrorism undermine the article. Anyone paying attention, presumably including politicians, knows why Islamic terrorists want to attack the US; the problem is the political difficulty of clearly stating the facts in public without being accused of being unpatriotic or of attacking America's allies. Likewise, the article glibly states all experts oppose protectionism, but in the words of Ha-Joon Chang, "Almost all of today's rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies." (http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm) Appeals to authority don't work; economists cannot be expected to be systematically unbiased, if their funding tends to depend on particular economic theories having political currency. The problem isn't that expertise is impossible, it's political structures which push objective inquiry aside. "It is very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it." The global warming "debate" also backs this point up. There is no doubt the experts are reliable, that global warming exists and is a serious threat. But we are unable to come up with an effective policy response, because fossil fuel companies can buy an opposition. > If we want to test whether fiscal stimulus cures recessions, we cannot prepare two identical societies, with identical recessions, and then apply fiscal stimulus in on e society but not the other. Nor can we take a large collection of societies with recessions and randomly assign half to receive fiscal stimulus and half to receive no fiscal stimulus. There is no reason that randomized controlled trials of economic policy could not be done on particular regions, and this is occasionally done already (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/12/randomised-control-trials http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/12/randomis...). It's really a bit outrageous that we'd introduce far-reaching economic changes with less evidential support than for a new brand of athlete's foot cream.