Don’t ask the experts

Michael Gove never intended to make his most famous remark. In an interview during the EU referen-dum campaign, the then justice secretary was told that the leaders of the IFS, CBI, NHS and TUC all disagreed with him about Brexit. He had tried to reply that people have ‘had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’. But he was picked up mid-sentence by his appalled interviewer. ‘Had enough of experts? Had enough of experts?’ Gove’s partial quote was held up to ridicule, as if it embodied Trump-style populist rage; the battle of emotion against reason.

As it turned out, the experts were all wrong — or, at least, everyone who predicted a instant and immediate recession after the referendum ended up feasting on humble pie. The Bank of England cut interest rates and printed money in response to an economic slowdown that now turns out to have been imaginary. Indeed, economic growth seems to have accelerated after the vote. Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, recently spoke about the economics profession having had its ‘Michael Fish moment’ — a reputation-shredding failure of prediction. Economists, he said, are now ‘to some degree in crisis’.

They’re in good company. Look at political scientists: on the eve of the US election, Princeton University academics calculated that Hillary Clinton had a 99 per cent chance of victory. This finding mattered, they said, because activists should know that they would be wasting their time campaigning for her and should help a Democrat congressman instead. The bookmakers gave Donald Trump a 20 per cent chance, and a Brexit victory only 11 per cent. Their error was based on opinion pollsters, who were confounded. A cartoon in The Spectator summed it up. It depicted three homeless men, each with a placard.