The daily nonsense that economics journalists pump out in search of sales for their newspapers is nothing new and one would think I would be inured to it by now. But I still am amazed how the same old lies are peddled when the empirical world runs counter to the narratives. I know that the research in psychology has found that people save time by using ‘mental shortcuts’ in order to understand the world around them. Propositions that we ride with are rarely scrutinised in depth to test their veracity. Rules of thumb are commonly deployed to navigate the external world. And we are highly influenced by the concept of the ‘expert’ who has a PhD or something and talks a language we don’t really understand but attribute an authority to it. In the field of economics these tendencies are endemic. We are told, for example, that the Ivy league universities in the US or that Oxbridge in the UK, are where the elite of knowledge accumulation resides. So an economist from Harvard carries weight, whereas another economist from some state college somewhere is ignored. And once we start believing something, confirmation bias sets in and we ignore the empirical world and perspectives that differ from our own. The consequences of this capacity to believe things that are simply untrue his one of the reasons our human civilisation is failing and major catastrophes like the LA fires are increasingly being faced.