Link to the original article:
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You’re right, that’s why you need legislation and regulation to prevent them from blowing up the balloon. The people pointing out the causal relationship aren’t necessarily in a position to do that themselves, they need to raise awareness so that there is sufficient concern to do something about it. That ain’t happening as long as bribery is legal, but that’s not the economist’s fault.
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That’s also not the economist’s fault. Raising the alarm and accurately predicting the causes of a crash are the things the economist are supposed to do. The boy who cried wolf was pretending when he raised the alarm. The economist is accurately describing the state of affairs, and the potential ramifications. Whether it takes 20 breaths or 100, the balloon will pop unless we take action and that remains true. If the boy who cried wolf saw wolves, and the wolves didn’t attack the sheep the first night, the boy is still doing his job to warn people. To torture this analogy a bit more, it’s like everyone can see the approaching wolves, and it is the townspeople who are the idiots for not believing the boy.
While broadly, I agree with your assessment, there is one issue I see. With each breath into the balloon, it gets closer to popping, but the beginning state of every balloon is empty and we WANT it to grow to a certain degree. If we go with 20 blows for instance, we WANT 10 of those. If you (economists) keep reminding the Blowers on each blow, then yeah, they’ll start to ignore you by blow 10. If instead we were to say, at blow 8, “hey, we’re about blown out, don’t blow too much more” it may do more good than shouting each time someone’s blowing.
