Thread by @t0nyyates

A question observers of the UK Conservative Vote Leave lot, and the GOP ask themselves all the time is - do they understand all this stuff at some level, and just concoct catchy lies about trade they have focused-grouped, or do they not understand it?

And for some, things like trade and 'sovereignty' have been their specialist topics for two decades. Is this ultra refined populist talking point discourse, or stupidity to a degree that should be astounding in those holding public office?

A bit unfair to single out Tories. @AndyBurnhamGM hopped on the populist trade bandwagon on immigration as did several other Brexity Labour MPs.

Remember the exchange with @MarcusFysh ? Where he says 'yada yada yada cod economics'? Yet literally has no grasp or answer to empirical evidence on trade gravity?

Here it is. Marvel at an MP representing you who knows nothing about his specialist topic:

https://twitter.com/MarcusFysh/status/962488066131849217

[Actually as an aside it was more suprising to me to discuss it with Brexit economist @dougmcw who, idiot that he is, convinced himself some crappy report they wrote overturned the whole literature.]

Perhaps I should not be so haughty. Perhaps it is just hard. Is there some inevitable tendency for societies to get to the point where running them is beyond the competence of those who are comfortable knocking on doors and wearing high viz jackets for the cameras?

Trade gravity. Externalities. The lump of labour fallacy. What trade deficits mean and don't mean. What central banks can do and can't. How a bank works and doesn't work. Actually just numbers and statistics. All hard and regularly beyond the capabilities of many MPs.

Oh, and now industrial policy. Both sides confident in front of the voters that they can magically 'level up', just like the last several 100 years in the UK and global economy never happened.

What is someone in my profession to do? 30 effing years reading papers, debugging spreadsheets and code, writing papers... culminating in the privilege of debating economics in a public forum with well known figures from public life...

....only to discover that many of them can't be bothered tor read and learn about the thing they are supposed to care most about.

You can't escape from the stupidity either by withdrawing from here. Every time I turn on the TV or radio, one of this clots has been invited onto a program to spout rubbish, interrupted with the occasional yes but from an interviewer equally unbriefed.

[PS apologies, the idiot who wrote some crappy report purporting to overturn trade gravity was in fact @dmcwilliams_UK not the one listed above, to whom apologies for tagging you into this, idiot angry tweeter that I am].

I think I need a beer and a ‘substantial meal’.

Brexit required getting your head around a lot. The lump of labour fallacy [no 'they' are not taking our jobs]; trade gravity [what? even though it's all around us, why we have towns and cities]; the nature of modern value chains in trade....

...national accounts - trade statistics; the notion of the counterfactual ['we'll be fine under no deal']; the abstract concept of sovereignty and what it can and can't do for you; the benefits of specialisation; finance and trade.

And this is just the economics, of course.

So it is excusable that many haven't done it. But not so excusable that leaders in public life have not managed it, and/or actively seek to hinder others' journeys.

See above tweet about the clots being invited on:

https://twitter.com/syrpis/status/1336954025468698624