Guest Work • May 15, 2017 •
By Rod Lamberts, Australian National University In 2016, conservative, pro-Brexit, British politician Michael Gove announced that people in England “…have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. In the US, Donald Trump famously doesn’t believe any expert who doesn’t agree with … Read More
Guest Work • Apr 04, 2017 •
By Andy Miah, University of Salford It’s not an easy time for scientists to talk to the wider public. The US president, Donald Trump, has called global warming “bullshit” and a “Chinese hoax”. In the UK, leave campaigner and MP Michael Gove famously declared that people “have had enough of experts”. But now UK MPs have published … Read More
Michael Reddell • Feb 20, 2017 •
A few months ago, I wrote a post on the role of “experts”, responding to a British journalist and author’s lament for the apparent willlingness of voters/societies to downplay, or even dismiss, the role of experts when it comes to making significant public policy decisions. In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Star-Times, local economist Shamubeel Eaqub returns to … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jan 29, 2017 •
If the UK is set to kick out a pile of highly skilled academics working there on EU passports, maybe New Zealand should look to the Brexitunity. I don’t know how many of them would move to New Zealand, and I don’t know which Departments have holes that need filling. But I’d expect that invitations to apply coming from New … Read More
Michael Reddell • Dec 14, 2016 •
Last week, The Treasury hosted a guest lecture featuring two visiting academics under the heading Brexit, Trump & Economics: Where did we go wrong. One of the visitors – Samuel Bowles, now a professor at the Santa Fe Insitute -had been around long enough that in his youth he had served as an economic adviser in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, … Read More
Guest Work • Nov 29, 2016 •
By Stephen Cushion, Cardiff University and Justin Lewis, Cardiff University During the 2016 EU referendum campaign, both sides used statistics pretty freely to back their arguments. Understandably, UK broadcasters felt compelled to balance competing perspectives, giving audiences the opportunity to hear the relative merits of leaving or remaining in the EU. In doing so, however, the truth … Read More
Brendan Moyle • Nov 11, 2016 •
There seems to be a fair bit of bashing of Pollsters of late. This is not surprising given that Brexit was expected to vote remain, and Clinton was expected to win the US presidential vote. The naive criticism is that the Pollsters got it wrong. I’m going to call this naive as in the case Brexit the polls were saying … Read More
Michael Reddell • Oct 25, 2016 •
There was interesting long article in The Guardian the other day by Sebastian Mallaby, the author of a new biography of Alan Greenspan, on “The cult of the expert – and how it collapsed”. His focus is central banking, but his concerns range much wider. For Mallaby, the (alleged) “collapse” of this “cult” is something to lament. Of course, … Read More
Michael Reddell • Jul 23, 2016 •
Since the successful Brexit vote on 23 June, there has been a great deal of (mostly rather disdainful) attention paid in some quarters to the demographic breakground of the support for Leave and Remain. Among aggrieved Remainers there has been a particular focus on the fact that – at least among those who bothered to turn out to vote – … Read More
John Kerr • Jul 15, 2016 •
In the wake of the Brexit vote, UK scientists have been extremely worried over uncertainties about European Union research funding – closer to home the question is ‘what does it mean for NZ science?’ Things are looking tough for the UK science sector. According The Guardian: “The backlash against UK researchers began immediately after the June referendum when the failure to … Read More