"Look at my economist over here"

Remember this, from last year?

Donald Trump sought to tout his support among African-Americans on Friday by pointing out a black man in the crowd and calling him "my African-American.""Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?"

These were, of course, the words of a known con-artist bigging up an almost non-existent group of supporters (in the subsequent elections just 8% "his" voters were black - 88% of African-Americans who voted came out for his opponent).

Times haven't changed much, as the British media, and in particular the BBC, proved when they looked at  an unimpressive array of practically bugger-all economists with a good word to say about Brexit, then pointed and shouted "Look over there" when a single rogue economist popped up with a shaky claim about a hard Brexit promising a "£135bn annual boost" to the UK economy.

Well, that headline lie has been round the world before the truth had got its boots on. The misleading headlines have been duly generated and the damage done but, for all that, it's still worth quoting Ben Chu in the Independent, at length, to get a sense of just how massively misleading this distraction was and how shamefully complicit the BBC has been in spreading the lie:

Imagine if a group of obscure scientists produced a piece of research which claimed to debunk the consensus of the profession.

Imagine if rather than making that research publicly available the group cobbled together a press release with some eye-catching headline figures, showing none of their methodology or data.

Imagine if that group of scientists had produced similar work in the past which had been shown to be deeply flawed by other scientists on multiple levels.

Now imagine if that press release was picked up by the national broadcaster of the country and presented to the public as an exciting and interesting new piece of research – with none of the above context mentioned.

Would you think that the broadcaster was doing a good job, fulfilling its mission to “educate and inform” the public?

Or would you wonder what they hell it was playing at?

This week, the BBC website “splashed” with the news that a group known as Economists for Free Trade had done some work suggesting that the UK economy could be £135bn larger if we forced through a hard Brexit. The next day the report’s author Patrick Minford was invited on to the BBC’s flagship morning radio programme, Today, to talk about his findings.

The programme did invite another economist on to contradict Minford’s views. But the non-specialist listener would have been left with the false impression that the economics profession was split on the issue, that the impact of Brexit is merely a matter of opinion. Leaving the EU’s single market might be good for trade, or it might be bad: the experts just can’t agree.

In fact, most experts are agreed - Minford is an outlier and an unreliable-sounding one at that:

He may not have released his methodology, but we can reliably guess how Minford generated his latest figures because he has in the past used a grossly unreliable economic model to show startlingly large gains from what has been termed “unilateral free trade” for the UK.

The principal and catastrophic flaw in this model is that it assumes that distance is no barrier to the international trade in goods – when all the empirical evidence of decades is that distance matters enormously, as countries do more trade with those who are geographically closer to them. Another fatal error is the assumption that price, rather than quality, is all that matters to consumers.

Numerous other reasons by other, more competent, trade economists have been identified as reasons to disbelieve Minford’s figures, not least the fact that his definition of hard Brexit, bizarrely, seems to assume closer regulatory harmonisation between Britain and the EU than exists at the moment within the single market. 

Isn't he the greatest?