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FEATURE PORTES MEETS GOVE Portes meets Gove


Michael Gove MP famously cast doubt on the sayings of ‘experts’ during the EU referendum campaign. In March, he and Professor Jonathan Portes debated the roles of experts and politicians at a session chaired by writer and broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer. By Martin Ince


the jobs that might be gained by increased exports, but not those lost by increased imports from the same places.


Alongside this task of “intellectual garbage


disposal,” Portes called for experts to take on a third task of pointing up issues, such as the minimum wage, on which there are no clear academic answers. Like other politicians, he said, Gove is happy to cite experts whose conclusions suit his





the focus was on the role of experts and expert knowledge. Gove had, after all, said during the Brexit campaign that people were fed up of experts from organisations with acronyms that suggest they know what’s best, but who in fact get it consistently wrong. First in the firing line have been the election polling experts and their flawed forecasts of the UK and US elections of 2015 and 2016. Portes began the discussion by pointing out that


D


even apparently objective, hard-science issues such as climate change can be controversial. But the real issues arise in the social sciences, and especially economics. As he sees it, experts here have three main roles. The first is to explain their findings in clear English. He chose an example from his six years as chief economist at the Department of Work and Pensions. One of his tasks there was to debunk the “lumps of labour” fallacy, which holds that there is a fixed amount of work to do in the economy. In fact, the whole economy grows if there are more workers, for example through immigration, or if more women do paid work. The second role Portes sees for experts is what


he terms “calling out bullshit”. He cited a report on the possible benefit to Brexit Britain of free trade deals with nations around the world. The report, widely noted in the Eurosceptic press, factored in


22 SOCIETY NOW SUMMER 2017


ESPITE BEING HELD under the auspices of the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe initiative, the debate was not about Europe. Instead,


Despite being held under the auspices of the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe initiative, the debate was not about Europe


Portes said Gove is happy to


cite experts whose conclusions suit his message


message while remaining sceptical about those who disagree with him. But experts themselves need to do better at explaining their findings. For example, they need to make it clear that economic forecasts are advice intended to help current policy, not factual predictions of the future.


” Why have a democracy?


Michael Gove began his riposte by “shooting some fish in a barrel,” with a long list of failed economic forecasts from bodies such as the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, the IMF, the OECD and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). All had been pessimistic about Brexit, and some had later had to change their minds publicly. Some had committed what Gove plainly regards as an even bigger crime, supporting the Euro, so providing intellectual backup for the calamity that later overwhelmed Greece and other Eurozone members.


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