Trump is gone but his vision of the economy remains entrenched and his influence prevails in the presidency of Joe Biden, with the same experts who promoted the false prophecies that reinforced the unequal, exploitative and irrational social and economic order that spawned Trumpism.
ATHENS – Opponents of former US President Donald Trump accuse him of being a liar. But Trump is far worse than a liar. Many politicians lie to cover up uncomfortable truths. But Trump can embellish long sequences of outrageous mendacity with truths that no other president would ever admit, from dismissing the dominant view of globalization as unequivocally beneficial to admitting that he did indeed try to defund the United States Postal Service so that the Democrats would pay attention to it. it will be more difficult to vote.
Scientists have good reason to celebrate Trump’s departure, judging by their obvious relief that they will now be able to present epidemiological data from the White House podium without fear of retaliation. But to determine whether we can expect a general resurgence of the truth in the presidency of Joe Biden, we have to start by remembering how our societies discern the truth.
Liberals love the market analogy. Like devices, opinions are wielded in the great market of ideas, where a decentralized process, involving consumers and producers of opinions and news, evaluates them. True opinions outweigh false ones.
Unfortunately, the market for ideas is itself a lie. Unlike gadgets or strawberries, the usefulness of ideas cannot be judged on an individual level. The average citizen cannot verify, on the basis of personal experience, the truth of Darwinism, Einstein’s special relativity, or Keynes’s argument that monetary policy stops working once interest rates reach zero. That is why we rely on unbalanced and inherently undemocratic institutions to test those theories on our behalf.
Universities and scientific associations take on the task of filtering falsehoods. Unlike the market analogy, they operate as a centrally planned league that organizes the hierarchical peer review process with a view to dispassionately falsifying premises.
All scientists have reasons for their own theory to survive this process, but in the natural sciences at least, there are protocols that are strictly observed and that ensure that theories not supported empirically dissolve in light of the evidence.
The disproportionate and impersonal scientific process freed our ancestors from ignorance and, together with commodification, overthrew the mother of all top-down systems: feudalism.
Trump is more dangerous than a mere liar because he found a way to exploit the other economic self of science. Behind every government policy that affects us lurks some economic hypothesis whose authority is supported by a peer review process that at first glance can be confused with the scientific process. The economy even awards its own Nobel Prize. But he is not the real deal, which makes him the great ally, albeit unwitting, of Trump.
Let’s consider the three pillars of any popular conspiracy theory. It offers followers the dizzying feeling of superior knowledge. It authorizes them to expose the selfish reasons of the experts for spreading lies. And finally, he enlists them in a cause that is superior to themselves against an enemy who will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out.
Let’s not forget that these are the same pillars that supported the Scientific Revolution. What sets science apart is the falsification process. Conspiracy theorists are not afraid of empirical evidence, because they can substantiate it or incorporate it into the theory itself. On the contrary, the empirical evidence helps science to dismiss the lie, due to the indifference of nature to our theories about it. The weather will do what it wants, beyond a meteorologist’s predictions, so when the meteorologist’s predictions are wrong, her model must be wrong.
Have you ever wondered how two Nobel laureate economists, who sometimes share the prize in the same year, can consider each other charlatans? This would never happen among Nobel Prize winning physicists or biologists. The reason it happens among economists is that markets and societies have nothing to do with the weather. Unlike the weather, if a venerable financial analyst predicts a sharp drop in the stock market, that drop will happen, even if the analyst was drunk when he made the prediction.
This is why neither success nor empirical failure causes an economic theory to ever be discarded. Like conspiracy theorists and theologians, economists of different schools – Keynesians, monetarists, and Marxists, for example – can explain every possible observation within the confines of their particular paradigm. And, like religions, the prevailing creed results from power struggles between groups that hide their interests behind different dogmas.
Herein lies Donald Trump’s opportunity. For decades before his election, countless homeless people had been hearing economic experts tell them that the policies that were destroying their lives survived the process of scientific falsification. It was a monstrous lie that allowed Trump to use his desperation against the establishment – and also against a scientific ethic tainted by its association with economics.
Trump is already gone, thankfully. But the vision of the economy that gave Trump his political foothold remains ingrained, and his influence is even greater in the presidency of Joe Biden. The new administration is brimming with the same experts who promoted the false prophecies that reinforced the unequal, exploitative, and irrational social and economic order that spawned Trumpism.
Let us consider as “natural” his invention of the mystical notion of unemployment to explain the failure of his theory that reducing real wages promotes employment. Or remember how, when the deregulation they promoted caused the financial crisis, they blamed the state’s overreaching in the mortgage business, while pressuring governments to bail out their deregulated payers.
Normalcy has returned to the White House. Biden will not try to lie, and will resort when he must to be blunt with the truth. But on the other hand, it will never reveal crucial truths like the ones Trump occasionally blurted out. Thus, the truth will continue to be under siege from the experts serving in the new administration and Trumpism – the movement that brought the toxic policies that supported the false economic truths of these experts to the world.
The author
Yanis Varoufakis, a former Finance Minister of Greece, is the leader of the MeRA25 party and a professor of economics at the University of Athens.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020
–
