Economists Now it’s don’t call us, we’ll call you, Mr President should keep to the facts, not feelings

US ECONOMIST Paul Romer has recently written of “mathiness”, by analogy with “truthiness”, a term coined by US talk show host Stephen Colbert. Truthiness presents narratives that are not actually true but are consistent with the world view of the person who spins the story. It is exemplified in rightwing fabrications about European health systems — their death panels and forced euthanasia — and in some activists’ support for alleged rape victims even when their allegations are unsupported by evidence.

Mathiness is a similar use of algebraic symbols and quantitative data to give an appearance of scientific content to ideological preconceptions.

It is characteristic of science to give precise meaning to concepts and the basis of their measurement. Every careful person equipped with a reliable thermometer will make the same reading of temperature. There are alternative scales, Fahrenheit and Celsius, but both record the same thing. We coin expressions such as “it feels cold” to acknowledge that subjective experience of temperature may differ from objective fact.

Economics is genuinely harder. National income is a more complicated concept than temperature, and there are plausible alternative sets of rules for calculating it.

Serious-minded statisticians have spent many years discussing these issues, and there is now a United Nations-sponsored standardised system of national accounts. Given the same underlying observations, most well-trained officials will come up with very similar answers to the question, “What is national income?”.

But it is easy to write a mathematical symbol without giving thought to what observable fact in the real world corresponds to that symbol, or whether there is such an observable fact at all.

The measurement of capital has always been controversial, in a way the measurement of national income is not, in large part because Karl Marx chose that term for the title of his book.

Half a century ago, the measurement of capital was at the centre of an ideologically driven debate, the so-called “Cambridge capital theory controversy” between a group led by the Cambridge university Marxist economist Joan Robinson and US scholars led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof Robert Solow — a debate Solow won easily because of the care he took to specify both his models and the relevant data.

But recently, capital measurement and ideology have again become intertwined, through the attention given to the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, with serious questions raised about the relationship between his data, his theory and the political stance that motivates his work.

In discussing “mathiness”, Romer makes a distinction between what he calls “Feynman integrity” and “Stigler conviction”. For physicist Richard Feynman, science involved “a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it.” This is a proper aspiration, though an idealised view of science that few scientists actually practise.

For George Stigler, a founder of the modern Chicago school of economics, “the successful inventor is a one-sided man. He is utterly persuaded of the … correctness of his ideas and he subordinates all other truths because they seem to him less important than the general acceptance of his truth”.

The distinction, made by Isaiah Berlin in his essay on Leo Tolstoy’s view of history, is between “foxes” who know many little things and “hedgehogs” who know one big thing. The strange thing about economics is that because it spans both science and politics, both characteristics — careful analysis and effective polemic — are required. The geniuses of the subject, such as Adam Smith and JM Keynes, combined both. The practitioners of mathiness lack skill in either. 2015 The Financial Times Limited.

MUCH has been read into the photograph of presidents Barack Obama and Jacob Zuma crossing paths at a United Nations (UN) lunch last week. We have no way of knowing what was going on in either man’s head. But it’s fun to guess.

Here’s what I hope. Obama was table hopping, saw the South African leader and graciously stopped by to say hello. Zuma, cellphone pressed to his ear with one hand, proffered the other. Obama shook it, gestured “call me when you have a moment”, and moved on, not wishing to interrupt.

What I fear is that Obama, as he shook Zuma’s hand, was amused to see a head of state on the phone at such an occasion, mimicked him by playing the telephonic equivalent of air guitar, and as he focused elsewhere, said to himself in his cool way, “what a strange little dude”.

Going with the first scenario, one wonders whether Obama would later have regretted the “call me” gesture. Quite apart from the time to be spent on the call itself, what would have made it worth his while to get briefed up for it?

Wasn’t Zuma just the latest in the line of African leaders who had made Obama so leery of engagement with the continent in the first place — the ethnic chauvinists who did in his father?

Could he forget how Zuma haughtily thwarted one of the signature initiatives of his administration to minimise global stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium?

SA, in the larger scheme of things, is a little country. What, for several shining moments, gave it heft in the world was the wonder of its transition, the moral stature of Nelson Mandela and the creative diplomacy of Thabo Mbeki, at least until he was undone by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, HIV/AIDS and the infantile left.

Now it is no longer even the go-to nation to get things done in its own backyard, where it is widely resented for its arrogance, sanctimony, xenophobia and superannuated ideology.

“Mandela is gone,” Secretary of State John Kerry told his counterpart, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, after the latest episode of the latterly very episodic US-SA strategic dialogue, “but his legacy remains as a challenge to all of us as we aspire to show or to try to show the same wisdom, the same loyalty to the truth and the same willingness to work together…”. “Us”, in diplo-speak, generally means “you”.

The truly challenged party, Kerry suggested, was the African National Congress government — unwise, untruthful and uncooperative.

SA’s shrinking stature is closely connected — irony of ironies — to its membership of a big boys’ club, the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA), or at least to the price it is paying to belong as the most junior of partners.

Obeisance to Moscow and Beijing is scarcely the path to respect, even in Moscow and Beijing.

How it advances SA’s quest for permanent membership of the UN Security Council is not obvious when there are larger, more authentically African alternatives.

If SA has any hope of being part of a transformed council, it had better rethink its strategy of sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his doctrine of sovereign dictators forever whatever the quantum of poison gas and barrel bombs they drop on their own people.

Happily, SA’s hopes of a larger say in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and related institutions, long overdue, are much more likely to be realised. Its fiscal and monetary policy remains in the hands of adults respected globally if not by every cadre at home.

From newspaper headlines, it may seem that the difficult issues in the US-SA relationship concern blocked exports of chicken parts, pork shoulders and beef, and the threat of expropriation allegedly posed by the Private Security Industry Regulation Act. Yes, it’s technically true that failure to satisfy the US on these matters could result is the loss of duty-free access to the US market for cars and wine, denial of official bilateral finance and even US vetoes on loans from the IMF and World Bank, should they ever be sought.

None of that is going to happen. Nor, so long as there’s money to be made, is investment going to dry up, regardless of who the government of the day aligns itself with.

From a US policy perspective, SA will be forgiven in order to spare its people from the folly, greed and ineptitude of its government. Its government will be treated with telephonic air guitar.

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Barber is a freelance journalist.