Populist policies can be myopic and also very hard to challenge

Public approval can be won with sound-bytes while economists struggle to explain complex adverse effects that go unseen

- RAGHURAM G. RAJAN

Even in the best of times, policymakers find it difficult to explain complex issues to the public. But when they have the public’s trust, the ordinary citizen will say, “I know broadly what you are trying to do, so you don’t need to explain every last detail to me." This was the case in many advanced economies before the global financial crisis, when there was a broad consensus on the direction of economic policy. While the US placed greater emphasis on deregulation, openness and expanding trade, the EU was more concerned with market integration. In general, though, the liberal (in the classical British sense) orthodoxy prevailed.

So pervasive was this consensus that one of my younger colleagues at the International Monetary Fund found it hard to get a good job in academia, despite holding a PhD from MIT’s prestigious economics department, probably because her work showed that trade liberalization had slowed the rate of poverty reduction in rural India. While theoretical papers showing that freer trade could have such adverse effects were acceptable, studies that demonstrated the phenomenon empirically were met with scepticism.