It is not very common for Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, to suddenly join video conferences broadcast worldwide and speak when she is actually not on the list of speakers.

So it was all the more remarkable that she did it on Monday evening at the central bank's annual research conference, suddenly switched to audio and video, and spoke in person.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in business.

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It was Esther Duflo, the committed French-American economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, winner of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2019, who moved Lagarde to make such a spontaneous expression of solidarity.

Duflo had complained that the vaccine was not being distributed fairly in the world and called on the powerful women of the world to work to ensure that vaccinations were also carried out in those countries that were not in a position to develop the vaccine themselves .

She was surprised that this had not happened long ago.

"We have the vaccines, we just have to get them into the world fairly - we haven't done it yet and I don't see why."

Largarde supports the proposal

Lagarde jumped in on the economist: you have just given a joint interview with Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. She was also completely “baffled”, so “perplexed”, said Lagarde: It could not be that the world could not act together because of 50 billion dollars for vaccine, while 6000 billion dollars as a fiscal stimulus to combat the economic consequences of the pandemic would be provided easily.

Previously, as this year's speaker at the "Jean Monnet Lecture", Duflo had highlighted the lessons that she believes can be learned from the pandemic for economics.

A book she wrote with her husband Abhijit Banerjee is called “Good Economics for Hard Times”.

It appeared before the pandemic, but the basic idea now fits particularly well.

Her thesis: Many of the important questions of our time, from migration to inequality and digitization to climate change, are also economic questions - but you need credible economics in order for science to have a say in these questions.

Many people distrust economists

So far, that's the problem, says Duflo.

If you ask people if they trust economists, it looks pretty bad.

In a survey-based ranking of the credibility of different professional groups, the economists landed far behind doctors and nurses.

Only the politicians would have done worse.

And that's not just due to prejudice.

People often disagree with the economists' assessment, even on key issues.

In America, for example, economists and other people had been asked whether tariffs on steel and aluminum to protect the American economy would at least benefit the Americans.

33 percent of non-economists were in favor - and 0 percent of economists.

It is not much different when it comes to questions about climate change, said Duflo.

Surveys have shown that while most people do not consider a CO2 price to be effective and regulations and prohibitions are very effective, it is the other way around with economists: "Economists love carbon prices and taxes."

Shockingly, people in polls stuck with their assessment even after hearing that economics experts disagreed.

“They know what economists think - but it doesn't convince them.” One reason why there is so much distrust of economists is that they often see themselves as forecasters - but their forecasts regularly fail.

Recessions, for example, are rarely forecast correctly.

The crisis showed the importance of the state

The crisis has now shown various things that economics can learn from, said Duflo. Covid-19 reminded everyone of what you need governments for. "Many corona problems, from lockdown to the distribution of vaccines to the risk groups, could not have been solved without the state." Economists should therefore no longer abuse the state as a "punching ball".

The unexpected of the crisis also showed that economists should not simply extrapolate past developments into the future. This also applies to climate change: "The future is sometimes very different from a continuation of the past." The crisis has also drawn attention to human dignity and injustices between people of different skin colors and genders. In addition, the rich countries would have to raise their awareness that they form a community of fate with the poorer: "We have to show that we are a planet."