Thread by @Helenreflects

Fascinating recent paper by Pascal Boyer and Michael Petersen on folk economic beliefs. A must read if you want to understand Trump's approach to trade of the UK government's (non) approach to EU negotiations researchgate.net/publication/32…

Some highlights of this paper. The authors list a series of folk economic beliefs, for instance "International trade is zero-sum, has negative effects"
This is a false belief. But many people think it's true.
They think somehow if A and B trade, and B benefits, A loses out 2/

Part of this is that ordinary people believe that a country "should always try to export more goods than it imports". Sounds familiar? Trade deficits bad for the country. This is Trump's trade war policy. Problem is, given that it's not based on reality, it won't help the US 3/

False folk economic belief #2 "Immigrants “steal” jobs" - people tend to think there's a fixed n of jobs to go around in a country (if that were true, imagine how countries with lots of people would fare! A country like Finland would have jobs to spare). 4/

FEB 3: "Immigrants abuse the welfare system", as the authors summarize it "immigrants are intuitively viewed as free-riding both on the jobs “we” created and the welfare systems “we” paid for" - it's clear those beliefs are just contradictory and yet held together by many 5/

Now, you cannot make a policy based on beliefs that are false. So, in this case, trade wars aren't going to improve working conditions "at home" and restricting immigration won't relieve stress on the welfare state or increase wages 6/

This leads me to the question: Why do governments implement policies that won't have the hoped-for effect (because the policies are based on false beliefs?) Why does the UK government want to limit migration, and why does the US engage in trade wars? 7/

The answer is possibly 2-fold
1. The government/Trump/etc actually believe this stuff OR
2. It's all just a way to pander to their voters who believe this stuff.
Either possibility is challenging, because these beliefs are false.
And false beliefs don't work /ends