Noah Smith has a Substack thing, and in this post argues that experts, like public health people vis a vis masks and economists on free trade, have lied. Masks do help and free trade hurts some people and some countries (when a multi-country trade agreement is implemented).
There's a lot of comments, too much for me to engage so I'll comment here.
Smith says, I think, that the lying is understandable but doesn't like it because it's elites deciding what's good to tell people.
In some ways I'd argue that the economists' perspective is a Christian one--an expansion of the Golden Rule. The economists are saying that overall the benefits of free trade are greater than the losses. The Golden Rule is usually stated as a one-on-one rule, but a reasonable expansion would be to say: act so that the world is a better place for its inhabitants, then free trade fits.
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