Sorry Vice President Gore, It’s Not Unemployment That Makes People Reject Expertise

Sorry Vice President Gore, It’s Not Unemployment That Makes People Reject Expertise.
On NPR’s Morning Edition, former Vice President Al Gore, asked about the public’s disenchantment with scientists, contended, “the expert blueprint for globalization that has been touted for quite some time has caused those who feel left behind to feel real anger that middle-income wages have stagnated for decades and I think that generalized anger at how things are going extends over into a vulnerability to listen to demagogic claims.” I would argue that this is the kind of political tone-deafness that has hurt the Democratic Party so much.
The truth is not so much about scientists getting things wrong, as about political elites seizing on arguments that are wrong without a second thought.
Poster child is the work of Paul Ehrlich, co-author of 1968’s The Population Bomb.
He somehow decided that agricultural productivity had reached its apex and population growth would be high and unyielding.
But Ehrlich has received no fewer than 17 major awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, known as ‘genius grants’.
Most of them were from environmental organizations, but many came after the year 2000, when it had become overwhelmingly abundant that his work was not valid.
His laughable predictions do give some pause.
A liberal newspaper in England reminded him of an earlier prediction: “…he would take ‘even money’ on the UK not existing as a state in the year 2000, adding that if it did survive it would be an impoverished island containing 70 million people.
Apparently, the thrust of his work is what matters, not whether there is any quality to it.