[FabHK]

Great book on this is James Kwak's "Economism" - the abuse of purported economic insight for political purposes.

As just one simple example, good old Hekscher-Olin trade theory (a neat general equilibrium model with 2 countries, 2 goods, and 2 factors of production, capital and labor) "shows" that free trade is a good thing, leading to a Pareto improvement.

But of course, that's predicated on a whole host of assumptions that might or might not hold, and furthermore predicated on the assumption that the "winners" compensate the "losers", through redistribution.

So, the economic case for free trade more or less includes the case for redistribution and compensation of those negatively affected by it - but that's often conveniently left out by proponents.

[notahacker]

Popular economics and popular "AI" as described in the article both seem like situations where everybody with an idea to push cites popularisation of research conclusions without understanding the limitations to the models and people with actual expertise in the field are often happy to play along with these hyperbolic, caveat-free popularisations because it helps their end goals.

Sure, the economics profession and its popularisers might be a little more incentivised by political aims and AI research and AI's hypers and commercialisers a little more by money, but both fields suffer from the fact whilst researchers agonise over tradeoffs between tractability and predictive accuracy and fitting and overfitting and wonder whether the class of problem they're looking at is even soluble, the people with the most confidence in their assertions tend to get the column inches, even if they barely know what they're talking about.

I only wonder whether it will ultimately lead to similarly widespread middlebrow dismissals[1] of the entire field of AI...

[1]for the avoidance of doubt, not an accusation I'm levelling at the poster above

[iwintermute]

Wasn't it the case with the first AI winter? When the field was overhyped, oversold and then imploded?

[mcguire]

And the second.

[VHRanger]

Right, but this is a political problem. H-O (or Ricardian trade) is about the simplest model of trade you can come up with to show the concept.

It's not like economists don't know there are problems in distribution of wealth -- one of the most discussed papers last year (see these podcasts [1] [2]) talks about the effects of China massively expanding trade with the US in early 2000s on some parts of the country.

Pretty much everyone has known for half a century what trade does, there's a political and logistical problem in redistribution, though (counties tend to get devastated, and people don't like to move).

Interestingly, trade has extremely similar labor market effects to automation.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/david_autor_on_1.ht...

[2] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-eat-americas-jobs/