CEPR | Carlos Lozada, the non-fiction book critic for the Washington Post,
promised "an honest investigation" of whether truth can survive the
Trump administration in the lead article in the paper's Sunday Outlook section. He delivers considerably less.
Most importantly and incredibly, Lozada never considers the
possibility that respect for traditional purveyors of "truth" has been
badly weakened by the fact that they have failed to do so in many
important ways in recent years. Furthermore, they have used their elite
status (prized university positions and access to major media outlets)
to deride those who challenged them as being unthinking illiterates.
This dynamic is most clear in the trade policy pursued by the United
States over the last four decades. This policy had the predicted and
actual effect of eliminating the jobs of millions of manufacturing
workers and reducing the pay of tens of millions of workers with less
than a college education. The people who suffered the negative effects
of these policies were treated as stupid no-nothings and wrongly told
that their suffering was due to automation or was an inevitable product
of globalization.
These claims are what those of us still living in the world of truth
know as "lies," but you will never see anyone allowed to make these
points in the Washington Post. After all, its readers can't be allowed
to see such thoughts. (Yes, I am once again plugging my [free] book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)
This was far from the only major failure of the purveyors of truth.
The economic crisis caused by the collapse of the housing bubble cost
millions of workers their jobs and/or houses. While this collapse was
100 percent predictable for anyone with a basic knowledge of economics,
with almost no exceptions, our elite economists failed to see it coming
and ridiculed those who warned of the catastrophe.
