In brief

Be sure your dodgy modelling will find you out. I’m starting to think economists have become so used to pretending to know more about the economy than they really do that they don’t notice the way they mislead the rest of us.

The Productivity Commission has proposed a radical change in the way companies are taxed which, it tells us, would improve the economy’s productivity and leave us better off. It has commissioned modelling that, it implies, supports its case for change.

Its modelling shows the benefit from cutting the rate of company tax would take years to materialise, and still be trivial, but the commission thinks we should do it anyway.