Month: January 2017

My case against the Parliamentary Budget Office: part II

As noted in a previous post, I am pursuing a case against the Parliamentary Budget Office at the CCMA.  And as also indicated in that post, I am not going to comment on any specific issues relating to the merits of the case, or the process, until the latter is completed. Nevertheless, given that the reporting of the matter has been intermittent and only partially informed, it is useful to recount some further, basic information here.

The most recent component of the hearing (day 5 and 6) took place on the 19th and 20th January, with the intention that the matter be completed on the 20th. Unfortunately that was not possible, for reasons which will become known in due course.

Media presence

More importantly, while the media were initially granted access, the two journalists present were requested to leave shortly after I started my cross-examination of the Director of the Office. The result is that the first two reports (News24 and Business Day) that did appear could effectively only report on 75% of the 5th day of the process and did not report any of the content of the Director’s cross-examination. One article reported the Director’s assertions, but not the testing of these assertions and more substantive issues; resulting in somewhat one-sided coverage.

While the media can only report what they observe, one might expect that the media’s (gentle) ejection from the process would be reported to at least provide readers with some context for the sudden cessation of coverage.

Meanwhile, in another case at the CCMA, the media have continued to be present despite the applicant (Mr Adrian Lackay) testifying to fairly sensitive matters, such as the alleged ‘rogue unit’ at the South African Revenue Services (SARS). Of course, every case is different and commissioners use their discretion to make such determinations. It is worth noting, though, that Lackay’s case led to the breaking of new ground on media access to CCMA arbitration thanks to work by Media24 and amaBhungane. Apparently the Commission has subsequently published rules and guidelines that formalised the position that public access, including media access, is the default. (Though many people, including legal practitioners, remain unaware of this).

Credibility

Naturally, when one raises matters like those that have emerged in this process, attacks on one’s credibility are par for the course. Exposing, directly or indirectly, the abuse of public resources and compromising of appointment processes to positions in public institutions is a sure way of engendering some hostility. In this instance, such attacks have come in blustered form within the process from Parliament’s representatives, statements by the Director (to the media and in testimony) and comments by one former colleague in testimony.

While such behaviour is to be expected, it remains very ill-advised to attack the credibility of someone who is, substantively, more credible than you are… In due course most of the truth about who acted professionally and ethically at the PBO, and who did not, will become known. It will then also become clear that serious action will be required to salvage some credibility for the institution.

A long road ahead

It is widely-accepted that independent fiscal institutions like parliamentary budget offices need to be beyond reproach:

the core values that IFIs both promote and operate under – independence, non-partisanship, transparency, and accountability – while demonstrating technical competence and producing relevant work of the highest quality that stands up to public scrutiny and informs the public debate (OECD Principles)

Unfortunately, it would appear that there is a long, difficult road ahead to achieve this in South Africa.

Economics: scientists and plumbers, or bullshit and mathiness?

On the 6th of January 2017 the Annual American Economic Association conference is scheduled to host a plenary address entitled The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making. The speaker is the academic economist Esther Duflo, widely-acclaimed for popularising the use of randomised control trials (RCTs).

Given my PhD work in economics on external validity of RCTs and implications for policy, and parallel work in philosophy, I have a few thoughts on this subject. In a draft paper (first presented in 2015) entitled When is Economics Bullshit? I argue that practitioners promoting RCTs have systematically overstated the policy-relevance of results and thereby produced ‘bullshit’ (as defined in the famous essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt).

A consistent problem in critiquing so-called ‘randomistas’ is that the goalposts have been constantly shifted. Early advocacy for RCTs within economics reflected a ‘missionary zeal’ (Bardhan). It has been suggested that experimental methods have led to a ‘credibility revolution‘: giving credibility to applied microeconomic work that apparently did not exist before. One recipient of the Bates Clarke medal argued that the introduction of RCTs indisputably rendered economics ‘a science’. In the policy domain I, along with other economists, have come across much grander and/or more extreme claims. But when challenged, proselytisers scale back the claims and deny ever overclaiming. So from missionary zeal, revolution and science we now have plumbing….

I look forward to reading Duflo’s speech/paper, but my own view of the methodology and philosophy of economics and RCTs suggests that plumbing is a very poor analogy.

In my own paper, motivated in part by claims that RCTs render economics ‘a science’, I tackle the question of scientific status head on. Using a revival of the so-called demarcation question (basically: how do we demarcate science from non-science or pseudoscience?) in philosophy, I argue that economics cannot (yet) be classified as a science, may never be classifiable as such and in the way it is used by some economists too-often verges on pseudoscience and/or bullshit.

The similarities between this very critical view and that of Romer’s recent critique of macroeconomics (which was made public later) are interesting. Romer focuses more on the use of mathematical modelling whereas my focus is on empirical methods. I will write a detailed comment on Romer’s piece later this year; I agree with some aspects but strongly disagree with others.

In its two presentations so far, my paper on bullshit has been relatively well-received by philosophers of science but not so well-received by philosophers of economics. There is good reason for this: the paper is even more an indictment of the current trend in philosophy of economics than it is of economics itself. The paper notes that in the absence of sufficient technical training and understanding of economics, philosophers in this area have increasingly taken the safer route of becoming apologists for the discipline. In effect, they compete to provide explanations of why economists are correct in their approach. (Exceptions to this, such as Nancy Cartwright – who has collaborated with Angus Deaton in providing important and influential critiques of RCTs – arguably prove the rule: Cartwright’s reputation was already established in philosophy of physics, causality and metaphysics).

The result, unfortunately, is that philosophy of economics currently has very little to add to economists’ critical understanding of their own discipline. Some critics, such as Skidelsky, argue that economists should read more philosophy, but while I am sympathetic to his overall stance I do not think economists would find much worth reading at present. Combining the abject failure of the ‘mainstream’ of philosophy of economics with the low quality of most economists’ reflections on methodological issues leaves us with few critical insights that could move the discipline beyond parochial or self-interested debates.