Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment seems very anti-intellectual, which is surprising to find on HN. Academics do not need to live in a place in order to study it rigorously. Not being blasé, but the rust-belt is the trade-off for globalization. The US asked the rest of the world to open up their markets for American goods and services and promised to do the same.
The attitude that “it’s just a trade off” is exactly the problem with abstract analysis. Millions of people in the Rust Belt lost their livelihoods and thousands of cities were economically destroyed. Maybe it was overall beneficial for Americans, but that isn’t the point I’m making. The point is that academic economists pushed policies that had unintended side effects (populism and protectionism) that perhaps they w…
Economists do not enact those policies -- they suggest policies. The fisherman also suggests policies to benefit his own work, just as the steel worker suggests his own policies, and just as the architect, the construction crews, the parents, the etc..
These policies are aggregated, and enacted, by your politician (of cascading hierarchy), whose job is to do that -- review the possible set of policies and their impact on different areas of his total domain, and with this overarching view, enact policies. The fisherman does not himself review his policies for how they would impact the steel worker, and neither does the economist review his policies for how they will impact the presidential election.
If your local politician is blindly following the recommendations of the economist, without concern for the rest of his domain, whose fault is that but the politician's?
The economist is not supposed to be an expert in all things about the world, and it would be absurd to imagine him to be. He is intended to be an expert of his domain (economics), and is meant to be one of many experts, each supplying their own, scoped, understanding of the world.
If the economist claims that his suggested policies will purely benefit all aspects of the economy, and have zero negative impact, then it would be fair to blame him, because he was plainly incorrect about the area he's intended to be an expert in. But if he fairly claimed that it would generally be beneficial, but certain areas of the economy would be impacted negatively in such a fashion, and his predictions are generally correct, then he has done his job without fault. The decision to enact the policy, knowing the benefits and the losses, is not made by him.