Well, this week, they both spouted off nonsense, and while one was ridiculed, the other was taken seriously.  Mr. Curry, for some unknown reason, decided to opine that the moon landing was fake–a product of Hollywood fantasy.  For those of us that have had the privilege of hearing from Astronauts that landed on the moon, and have been active in the US Space Program–as I formerly was–this is of course utter nonsense. Not that you needed to have been in the space business to realize that.  And just because someone is a celebrity, it doesn’t mean we should listen to anything they have to say, if it is not accord with sound reasoning.  So Mr. Curry was rightly criticized; one can only wonder what the management of the Golden State Warriors was thinking when their superstar said something like this.  But I’ll still watch him play basketball, that is, if I have time to watch basketball, because his idiosyncrasies have nothing to do with his amazing basketball skills.

Mr. Scott, however, as the senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, says, the Trump steel tariffs haven’t led to the end of the world, and the U.S. hasn’t been hurt.

“We found absolutely no evidence of broad, negative impacts on the economy of steel and aluminum tariffs to date,” said Robert E. Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, who authored the report with support of the U.S. aluminum company Century Aluminum.  Ten percent tariffs on aluminum were announced in March. Since then, the institute note, three smelters have being restarted and one has announced a capacity expansion. It said the U.S. aluminum companies have added about 300 jobs, and companies that process aluminum into finished products have expanded, generating $3.3 billion in investments that could employ 2,000 more workers. Overall, U.S. manufacturing has added more than 200,000 jobs since just before the tariffs were put in place, according to the Labor Department’s November jobs report last week.

Now aside from the fact that the very progressive leaning EPI did this report with support from industry*, every economist knows that this logic of Mr. Scott is largely irrelevant.  Consider this: you are in training for a marathon, and you decide that since you’re burning a zillion calories a day, you can splurge on two Krispy Kreme donuts every day.  Let’s say you otherwise eat healthy, and follow your strict training regimen.  If you subsequently lose weight leading up to the marathon, one would not conclude that the secret to losing weight is to eat two donuts a day.  We would understand that something else led to the weight loss.  We might even understand that if you hadn’t eaten those donuts, your weight loss would be even more dramatic.

The same logic applies in economics, which is why its always possible to find someone somewhere who will ignore other variables that are changing, and will fall for the post hoc fallacy–before this, therefore because of this– and think that a lack of the economy going into the tank means that the tariffs weren’t a factor.  The fact that manufacturing jobs overall might be up says nothing about manufacturing that is heavily dependent upon the price of steel and aluminum.  While I don’t know whether the auto manufacturers are just using this as an excuse (I have no insight into their cost structure), they have repeatedly blamed these tariffs on some of their own production problems.  The fact that aluminum smelters have been restarted says nothing about the jobs that were lost (or more likely, never created) in response to the higher metal input prices.

So, my opinion is we should not listen to Mr. Curry–we should just watch him shoot basketball.  And we shouldn’t listen to Mr. Scott either, but in his case, we shouldn’t watch him play basketball either.

* You know if a conservative group study was funded by industry it would be immediately rejected as obviously false.  I don’t think that is true in either case–rather we must prove the falseness with logic not ad hominem.