Hello ! This is my first post here. I hope you can help me. I am a french student in economics, I wrote this english text below. If you see any grammar faults, please let me know. Thank you very much for your answers.
The use and abuse of economics
This is an article published in the Economist on the 25th of November 1995. The Economist is an economic weekly magazine. The text is an editorial, that is, a paper in which its author presents his own point of view. The text therefore is not supposed to be objective. It is entitled "The use and abuse of economics" and treats of (has as main subject?) the distortion of economic ideas by politicians. The paper begins with the exposition of a paradox: economics is recognized as a sound discipline. This social science is more and more influential in our societies. Yet, economists are much criticized. What could explain this paradox? The whole of the text intends to answer to this question. If economists are so derided, it is because of the distortions of their ideas, mainly by politicians.
Economics is more and more influential in our societies. Its specialists should then be accepted as authorities. Yet, this is not the case. They are even more and more derided. This situation is partly due to economists themselves that tend to exaggerate their differences and to quibble about quite insignificant matters.
However, the chief responsibles (responsible?) of this paradox are politicians. Indeed, the man in the street is informed about economics mostly through them, and the latters (latter?) often distort economic ideas in order to be re-elected. This distortion is made by three ways.
1) The one-sided coin
All the economic facts (inflation, trade surplus or deficit, interest rates change etc.)
contain in themselves advantages and drawbacks : all coins have two sides. Politicians see the two aspects of each one but tend to present only one side in order to corroborate their political aims. In other words, they stress on the side which suit them. Doing that (ce faisant), they mislead people and prevent them to understand economics.
2) Shoot the messenger
The market is a place that centralized all the knowledge, all the decisions of its operators. The information is "materialized" in the different market prices. Prices show which operations are profitable for economic agents. For example, in the financial market, speculators give information to government taking advantages of some market anomalies. They are not the responsible but the messengers of these anomalies. On the contrary, bringing these anomalies to light, they give useful signal to governments : Yet, the latters (latter ?) mislead people "shooting the messengers".
3) Allergy to change
When politicians fear to economic change, they tend to mislead people inventing some fallacious arguments. For exemple, the politicians of industrialized countries that do not want to change the structure of their economy argue that new technology destroy more jobs than it creates, what is false.
Unfortunately, politicians can be expected to keep on misleading people, making fallacious claims with demagogic aims.