Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, Alex Tabarrok offers a reason as to why those who were right about the financial crisis and the Iraq war from the beginning get so little media attention, over at Marginal Revolution.
The answer is media incentives. It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now?
The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?