I strongly believe that knowledge is fundamental to running a society. We need economists who understand monetary policy in central banks. We need researchers who have studied history, strategy, and military affairs to help steer national defense. We need doctors and public health experts to design effective responses to epidemics. But the public needs sound reasons to let these experts shape their future. Once that trust evaporates, we are all worse off. Unfortunately, the Jason Arday scandal is the perfect example of how these experts, and the institutions they run, are destroying that trust. I do not find Arday’s tales extraordinary. Throughout history, there are thousands of examples of people spinning fantastic tales about their lives. He is just one more name on a long list of confidence men. What is extraordinary is the massive institutional failure at every level. Liverpool John Moores University granting a degree for a Ph.D. dissertation that did not survive even basic scrutiny (including a grammatical mistake in its title). Cambridge University appointing him (full) professor at an unusually early academic age (eight years after his dissertation; in academia, this is what matters, not your biological age) and with a scholarly record that was rather thin. Hilary Cremin (@hilarycremin), head of the Faculty of Education, telling the world on television that Arday was “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” The BBC broadcasting segments about Arday, a most unusual decision for an academic appointment. Simon & Schuster paying him a large advance for his memoirs on the basis of a book proposal that defied common sense. And Amazon promoting his book, still this very morning, as an editor’s pick. If I were a regular person, say someone driving a truck in the Midlands or working at a small shop in Sussex, how could I trust the universities any longer? How could I trust the BBC and the media? How could I trust the publishing industry? How could I trust Amazon’s editor’s picks? Then, should we be surprised if the farmer or the shop owner votes for someone selling snake oil? Or if they refuse to listen to the case for policies that cost them in the short run but benefit them in the long run, such as the transition to net zero emissions? Or if they read books written by charlatans? Or if they deny basic scientific findings? The universities, the media, the publishing industry, Amazon, and many of our other core knowledge institutions have a serious problem. Their response is to close ranks and avoid a serious discussion. No, sorry, this will not do. The Jason Arday scandal should be a moment of reckoning. Unfortunately, I am afraid it will not be.

Many economists forget that the first-order problem of an aging society, one with high life expectancy and low fertility, is how to redistribute income from workers to retirees. How fast output grows is, surprisingly enough, the lesser question. If you have roughly as many retirees as workers, what each worker produces must be split in two, one part for the worker, one part for the retiree. At a basic level, it does not matter whether we do it through taxes, as in a pay-as-you-go social security system, or through capital income, as in a fully funded one. Workers will not be happy to see half of their income taken away, whatever the absolute level of that income. This redistribution will poison the political system and lead, with high probability, to dysfunctional policies. We are already seeing it across Europe in the fights over retirement benefits. And much of the American unhappiness about the profits of large corporations, largely owned by the old, is the same conflict, only in the fetishized form of equity ownership. Claims of the form “technological progress (e.g., advances in AI) will fix the problems brought by aging” miss the political economy of the situation. Aging is about politics, not TFP.