Are dissenting climate views welcome at the ECB?

The field of economics is often accused of being unscientific.  In almost all cases it is non-experimental and the vagaries of human nature make it difficult to study.  But economists, like myself, normally at least try to abide by scientific principles.

In the academic world, there is also a distinction between theory and application.  Clever theories are often fun to think about, but without empirical support that’s all they can offer. Economics is filled with counterintuitive results, so plausibility is not a reliable indicator that a particular theory actually applies in practice. A common approach is therefore to combine theory with empirical work to determine whether the ideas posited are relevant in the real world.  Clever theories with strong empirical support lead to Nobel Prizes if the subject matter is important enough.

If I was to develop a plausible theoretical model, concede that there was no evidence to support it, and then zealously claim that my theory will be true in the future, I would be ridiculed by most academically trained people.  You just can’t win intellectual arguments like this, the best you can hope for is some kind of scoreless draw.

Which brings me to the recent events at the European Central Bank (ECB).  Frank Elderson, a leading executive at the bank, complained that many of its research staff “came from the best universities, but they still don’t know how to spell the word ‘climate’.” He went on to question why the ECB hires people who then need to be “reprogrammed.”  He was commenting on the bank’s various green initiatives, which have apparently been getting a bit of internal pushback from the hired help.