Chrystia Freeland

This is a tough time for experts. Empowered by the Internet and embittered by the sour economy, many people doubt the wisdom of expert elites. Journalism sometimes casts further doubt by seeking polarized positions that can draw an attention-grabbing debate, or by taking refuge in he-said-she-said accounts to avoid the harder job of figuring out who’s right.

Now one tribe of specialists – economists – is striking back. Concerned that the great unwashed have come to see all economic proposals as being equally valid, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has led an effort to figure out what economists agree on, where they diverge and how certain they are about their views.

To do that, the Booth school called on reputable economists to join its panel of experts. Each week, the panelists are asked whether they agree or disagree with a particular economic idea.

“Among practicing economists, it is understood that the media and the political process paints economists as more divided than they are,” explained Anil K. Kashyap, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago and a leader of the project. “It is more sensational and maybe makes for better reading to have point-counterpoint. It seemed reasonable to provide some context. There’s a lot more settled issues than most people have a sense of.”

As an example, Kashyap cited the gold standard, the monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold.

Prepare for the revenge of politics. For the past few decades, the quants – mathematicians, physicists and technologists – and their younger brothers, the economists, have been in the ascendant. With their mathematical models and their ability to crunch vast quantities of data, they have shaped the way businesses understand the world and operate within it.

But politics is making a comeback. That was one of the persistent themes at an invitation-only high-powered international conference about systemic risk in the financial services convened by the Global Risk Institute in Toronto this week (I was the rapporteur). As one of the bankers put it, if you want to understand the world economic outlook for 2013, and where your company should invest, you can’t just talk to economists anymore: “You need to talk to political scientists.”

I tested that idea with two thinkers – one an economist, the other a political scientist – who make their living helping businesses understand the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ian Bremmer, the political scientist and founder of the Eurasia Group, instantly agreed.

Which is the more powerful agent of social change: fear or sympathy? Women in rich and middle-income countries may soon find themselves enrolled in a real-life experiment testing this proposition. That is because birthrates are dropping in much of the world. Demographics may soon rocket to the top of the political agenda, demanding an entirely new way of thinking about women and motherhood and the economy.

One reason for the shift was, as it were, born in the USA. That is because, for a long time, the United States has watched declining birthrates in places like Western Europe, Russia and even China with an air of superiority. The United States, lusty and fertile, was bucking the demographic trends.

Then, last week, new data showed that in 2011 the U.S. birthrate fell to the lowest level ever recorded: 63.2 babies per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered. That halting recuperation is why the global economic meltdown is still at the center of the political debate in the Western world.

Much of the discussion is a replay of the familiar battle between the economists John Keynes and Friedrich Hayek: Is the solution stimulus or austerity? Amir Sufi, a professor at the University of Chicago Business School, has been doing provocative research that suggests we should be focusing on a different angle.

The real issue, in Mr. Sufi’s view, is where stimulus dollars should be targeted.

As it appears in the December 2012 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

George Soros cites Isaiah Berlin as an important intellectual influence, so it makes sense to see Soros through one of the Riga-born philosopher’s best-known lenses — the division of the world into foxes and hedgehogs. In his public life, Soros is a broad-minded fox: As a hedge fund manager, his success rested on his ability to make many different bets every day. In his philanthropy, Soros is foxy too, supporting, under the broad umbrella of “open society” dozens of causes in dozens of countries.

But intellectually, Soros is a more narrowly focused hedgehog. He has been pondering, articulating, elaborating, and publicizing variations on one big idea for more than half a century. The way he describes that central thought today is “the significance of imperfect understanding as a motive force or determinant of history.”

Over the years, Soros’s written expositions of this concept have sometimes met with bafflement, even as his financial prowess and philanthropic accomplishments have been widely admired. For Soros himself, though, his big idea and many public initiatives are intimately connected; his intellectual framework, he believes, is what has made him good at everything else. And, to his delight, after years of struggling to be accepted as a public intellectual, the turmoil in the world economy has finally made the rest of us more receptive to his insight.

When Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist, published “The Haves and the Have-Nots,” a study of global income inequality last year, one of his most striking observations was the extent to which the subject was taboo in the United States.

As Milanovic explained, “I was once told by the head of a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C., that the think tank’s board was very unlikely to fund any work that had ‘income’ or ‘wealth inequality’ in its title. Yes, they would finance anything to do with poverty alleviation, but inequality was an altogether different matter.”

“Why?” Milanovic asked. “Because ‘my’ concern with the poverty of some people actually projects me in a very nice, warm glow: I am ready to use my money to help them. Charity is a good thing; a lot of egos are boosted by it, and many ethical points earned even when only tiny amounts are given to the poor. But inequality is different: Every mention of it raises, in fact, the issue of the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income.”

For America, 2012 will go down in history as the year of the Latinos, the blacks, the women and the gays. That rainbow coalition won President Barack Obama his second term. This triumph of the outsiders is partly due to America’s changing demographics. And it is not just the United States that is becoming more diverse. Canada is, too, as is much of Europe.

That is why it is worth thinking hard about how to make diverse teams effective, and how people who straddle two cultural worlds can succeed. Three academics, appropriately enough a diverse group based in Asia and America, have been doing some provocative research that suggests that our ability to comfortably integrate our different identities – or not – is the key.

In “Connecting the Dots Within: Creative Performance and Identity Integration,” Chi-Ying Cheng of Singapore Management University, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and Fiona Lee, also at the University of Michigan, argue that ethnic minorities and women in male-dominated professions are most creative when they have found a way to believe that their “multiple and conflicting social identities are compatible.”

Among the losers in the United States this week are the super-rich, who spent unprecedented millions to evict President Barack Obama from the White House. The investing class turned sharply and vociferously against the president many of them had supported in 2008. On Tuesday night, the plutocrats lost their shirts.

“Boy, they threw away a lot of money,” Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor, told me. “It was very interesting to hear on Tuesday night about all the corporate jets packed in Logan Airport” for Mitt Romney’s party in Boston.

One of the important questions in the United States today – and, eventually, in all democracies where income inequality has risen sharply, which is to say in pretty much all democracies – is what impact the political ineffectiveness of the super-rich at the ballot box will have on how the country is actually governed.

If you are looking for some good cheer in a pretty gloomy world, consider the growing consensus among some of the world’s smartest money that the next big emerging market may be Africa.

Above all, that is great news for Africans: As we have seen across so much of Asia, economic growth has accomplished what decades of well-meaning development efforts failed to do, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. If that happens in Africa, the world will be transformed.

This case for Africa as the world’s new economic tiger is made forcefully in “The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution,” a data-packed collection of essays to be published at the end of this month and brought together under the aegis of Renaissance Capital, an investment firm with Russian roots and global ambitions.

President Barack Obama did a miserable job of making his own case last week. But speak to his supporters and the pitch is clear: The American middle class is being hollowed out; Obama’s self-appointed mission is to try to save it.

That is what I heard from Jeffrey Liebman, one of the president’s economic advisers, at a debate about the election I moderated at Columbia University on Monday. Liebman said the central difference between his candidate and Mitt Romney was the president’s view that trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Instead, he believes policy needs to focus on the middle class. Economic growth, he said, should come from the middle and radiate out.

In a separate interview, Mark Gallogly, co-founder of the private equity and credit investment firm Centerbridge Partners and one of Obama’s earliest supporters on Wall Street, likewise emphasized the middle class. The president’s overriding concern, Gallogly told me, was with the workers who make $24,000 a year. Their lot is a pressing issue, Gallogly argued, because even before the recession there had been persistent downward pressure on middle-class wages. Yesterday’s middle-class job can land you among the working poor today.