Why Economic Experts Keep Telling You Half the Story?

Let me tell you about a problem that’s been bothering me for a while now. It’s about how we talk about economics in public, and why the people who should know better keep leaving out the most important parts of the story.

The Strange Case of Growth Without Jobs

Here’s something that happened recently in the United States that should make you scratch your head. The economy grew at around four percent, which is unusually strong. But at the same time, job creation basically stalled. The economy expanded, but people weren’t getting hired. How does that work?

If you read the Reuters coverage and similar mainstream economic reporting, you’d come away thinking this happened because of artificial intelligence boosting productivity and demographic shifts limiting the available workforce. Those explanations sound smart and forward-looking. They fit nicely into stories about innovation and technological progress. The only problem is that they explain maybe twenty or thirty percent of what actually happened.

What these articles barely mention, or skip entirely, is the most obvious factor staring us in the face. The United States pumped more than thirty trillion dollars into its economy through monetary expansion. That’s not a minor detail you can tuck away in a footnote. That’s the whole story.

When you flood an economy with that much money, GDP numbers go up for reasons that have nothing to do with productive economic activity or job creation. Asset prices inflate, so real estate transactions and stock valuations add to GDP without creating jobs. Companies access cheap capital to invest in automation instead of hiring workers. Financial engineering and stock buybacks boost corporate valuations and show up as economic growth, but they don’t add a single employee to anyone’s payroll.

This is basic monetary economics. Money supply expansion affects different parts of the economy in different ways. It tends to inflate assets first, benefiting people who already own stocks, real estate, and other investments. Only later, if at all, does it trickle down to wage growth and employment. Yet the economists writing these articles, people who definitely understand this mechanism, choose to focus their explanations on technology and demographics instead.

Why would they do that? Let’s be honest about this. Talking about massive monetary expansion honestly would require admitting that central bank policies created enormous distortions in how wealth gets distributed. That conversation gets uncomfortable quickly when you realize it means the rich got dramatically richer while workers saw stagnant job opportunities. The AI productivity story is cleaner, more exciting, and doesn’t implicate anyone’s policy decisions in creating inequality.

India’s Interest Rate Puzzle

Now let’s look at another example that shows the same pattern. In India, the Reserve Bank of India maintained relatively high interest rates even as inflation fell to multi-year lows. If you read the RBI’s official communications, they emphasize controlling inflation and maintaining financial stability. They talk about global risks and policy prudence. These all sound like responsible, technical reasons for monetary policy decisions.

But there’s a much bigger factor driving this decision that gets mentioned only vaguely, if at all. The RBI is trying to prevent capital flight. In a volatile global environment where investors can pull money out of emerging markets at any moment, keeping interest rates higher helps attract and retain foreign capital. It supports the rupee’s value and stabilizes the financial system against external shocks.

Why doesn’t the RBI just say this directly? Because admitting you’re keeping rates high primarily to prevent investors from fleeing sounds defensive. It suggests vulnerability rather than strength. So instead, central bankers wrap the same policy decision in more flattering language about inflation management and financial stability.

The problem is that without understanding the capital flight dynamics, people can’t make sense of why rates stay high when inflation is low. Businesses can’t properly plan their investments. The public can’t understand the trade-offs being made with their economic wellbeing. The incomplete explanation serves the institution’s communication goals but fails the public’s need for genuine understanding.

The Pattern Behind the Problem

These aren’t isolated incidents. They represent a systematic pattern in how economic information gets communicated to the public. Complex economic phenomena get reduced to simplified narratives that emphasize certain mechanisms while downplaying others. The mechanisms that get emphasized tend to be the ones that sound sophisticated, forward-looking, or politically neutral. The mechanisms that get minimized tend to be the ones that implicate policy decisions in creating inequality, reveal institutional vulnerabilities, or require uncomfortable conversations about winners and losers.

Think about how inflation got covered during the pandemic recovery period. Mainstream reporting focused heavily on consumer prices rising, on gas and groceries costing more. Those stories were everywhere, and they were real. But there was much less coverage of how the same monetary conditions were simultaneously inflating asset prices. Billionaire wealth increased by more than 1.3 trillion dollars, representing a 193 percent increase between March 2020 and December 2024. Stock portfolios soared. Real estate values exploded. The wealth gap widened dramatically.

Research shows that inflation exacerbates wealth inequality by increasing top wealth shares while reducing those at the lower end of the distribution, with these effects intensified by stock market development. Yet this dimension of the inflation story rarely appeared front and center in public discourse. People heard constantly about their costs going up, but much less about why the wealth gap was exploding at the same time. They got half the story, the half about their struggles, while the other half about massive wealth accumulation remained buried in academic papers and specialized financial reporting.

Why Economists Are the Worst Offenders

Here’s what really bothers me about this situation. Central banks have institutional reasons to be cautious about full disclosure. They worry about market reactions and maintaining credibility. You can understand, even if you don’t agree with, why they communicate carefully.

But economists writing for major news outlets? They should be the ones providing the complete picture. They’re supposed to be the experts who can cut through institutional spin and explain what’s really happening. Instead, they’re often producing the most incomplete narratives of all.

These are trained professionals. They understand monetary transmission mechanisms. They know how capital flows affect policy decisions. They’re not making innocent errors of omission. They’re making strategic choices about what to highlight and what to minimize, and those choices consistently favor explanations that avoid uncomfortable truths about inequality, policy failures, and institutional vulnerabilities.

When Reuters explains jobless growth by focusing on AI and demographics while barely mentioning the thirty trillion dollars in monetary expansion, that’s not an oversight. When economic coverage during the pandemic emphasized consumer price inflation while minimizing asset price inflation, that wasn’t because journalists forgot to check what was happening to stock prices and real estate values. These were choices about what story to tell.

The Consequences of Incomplete Truth

This practice of strategic incompleteness has serious consequences that ripple through our entire economic system. When the public, investors, businesses, and even policymakers operate with a partial view of economic reality, they make decisions based on incomplete information. They underestimate risks related to excess liquidity, financial instability, and capital flow volatility because these elements aren’t being frontally addressed in mainstream economic discourse.

The erosion of trust matters enormously. When official sources repeatedly tell people the economy is strong while those same people struggle with affordability and stagnant wages, a credibility gap opens up. Later market corrections or policy adjustments can seem like contradictions or deliberate obfuscation. People stop believing economic news altogether, not because they’re irrational or poorly informed, but because their experience keeps contradicting what experts tell them.

This creates distorted decision-making at every level. Businesses might delay hiring or investment because they don’t understand the real drivers of current economic conditions. Policymakers might ease monetary policy prematurely because they’re focused on the technological explanation for jobless growth rather than the liquidity explanation. Individuals might make poor financial decisions because they don’t understand how monetary expansion affects different asset classes differently.

Perhaps most importantly, this practice of incomplete economic communication prevents us from having honest conversations about the trade-offs inherent in economic policy. Every policy decision creates winners and losers. Monetary expansion might boost GDP and prevent deflation, but it also enriches asset owners at the expense of wage earners. High interest rates might prevent capital flight and protect currency stability, but they also slow domestic growth and make borrowing more expensive for businesses and consumers.

We can’t evaluate these trade-offs intelligently if we don’t know they exist. We can’t hold policymakers accountable if we don’t understand what their decisions actually accomplish versus what they claim to accomplish. We can’t participate meaningfully in democratic debates about economic policy if the experts explaining these policies systematically omit the most important dimensions of how they work.

Why This Happens

Understanding this pattern requires looking at the incentives and constraints that shape economic communication. Human cognitive biases play a role. Confirmation bias leads people to emphasize information that supports their existing beliefs. Framing effects mean that how you present information matters as much as what information you present. Economists, like everyone else, are subject to these biases.

But there are also institutional and political factors at work. Many economists work for institutions that benefited enormously from monetary expansion. There are implicit conflicts of interest in drawing too much attention to the distributional effects of policies that made your employer or clients dramatically wealthier. Media outlets depend on relationships with central banks and government agencies for access and information, creating subtle pressures to frame coverage in ways that don’t burn those bridges.

Political considerations matter too. Discussions of inequality and wealth distribution quickly become politically charged. It’s easier to write about technology and demographics than to write about how policy decisions systematically transfer wealth upward. The former sounds like objective economic analysis, while the latter sounds like political advocacy, even when both are equally factual.

There’s also the challenge of complexity. Economic reality involves multiple simultaneous mechanisms interacting in complicated ways. It’s genuinely difficult to explain all of these mechanisms clearly and accessibly. The temptation to simplify by focusing on one or two factors is understandable. But there’s a difference between simplifying for clarity and selectively omitting information that would change how people understand the situation.

What Needs to Change

A fair and effective approach to economic communication requires full, honest disclosure of all relevant economic factors when explaining financial events or policy decisions. This means talking about excess liquidity effects, capital flow dynamics, and geopolitical realities, not just the factors that fit neatly into preferred narratives.

Media outlets covering economics need to embrace analytical rigor even when it complicates the story or challenges powerful institutions. Central banks and policymakers should acknowledge uncertainties and trade-offs candidly rather than wrapping every decision in technical language that obscures the real motivations. Economists writing for public consumption should see their role as explaining complete economic reality rather than producing narratives that serve institutional or political purposes.

We also need better economic education for the public. When people understand how monetary policy works, how capital flows affect exchange rates, and how different types of economic growth affect different groups differently, they become more sophisticated consumers of economic information. They can spot incomplete narratives more easily and demand better explanations.

Transparent economic dialogue fosters trust in a way that carefully managed communication never can. People can handle complicated truths. What they can’t handle is being told one thing by experts while experiencing something completely different in their daily economic lives. That disconnect creates cynicism and disengagement, making it harder to build consensus around any economic policy.

The Bottom Line

Deliberately or inadvertently sidelining core economic principles while explaining financial phenomena is an unfair practice with serious consequences for trust, understanding, and effective policy. It’s particularly egregious when professional economists, who should know better and who have a responsibility to public understanding, are the ones producing the most strategically incomplete narratives.

The next time you read economic analysis that seems to be missing something obvious, trust that instinct. Ask yourself what factors aren’t being discussed and why. Look for alternative sources that might fill in the gaps. Recognize that economic communication is shaped not just by data but by behavioral, strategic, and political dynamics that systematically favor certain types of explanations over others.

We deserve better than half-truths wrapped in technical language. Economic literacy depends on honest, complete explanations that acknowledge all the major forces shaping economic outcomes, not just the ones that fit comfortably into preferred narratives. Recognizing and correcting this tendency toward strategic incompleteness is essential for sound economic governance and informed public discourse.

Until we demand and receive that level of honesty from economic experts and institutions, we’ll continue to operate in a fog of partial understanding, making decisions based on incomplete information while wondering why the economy we’re told about never quite matches the economy we experience.

References

[1] Q. Consider the following statements – https://lotusarise.com/qna/upsc/q-consider-the-following-statements-59

[2] What is Capital Flight, Rupee Depreciation, Risk-Off – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/explained-what-capital-flight-rupee-depreciation-risk-off-mohan-e2nbf

[3] EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF RBI’S POLICIES ON THE – https://www.ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR19D6045.pdf

[4] Capital Flight: Definition, Causes, and Examples – https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalflight.asp

[5] Repo Rate Cut and its Implications – https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/repo-rate-cut-and-its-iimplications

[6] Bank Rate vs Repo Rate: Impact on Indian Economy – https://stoxbox.in/financial-news-hotbox/bank-rate-vs-repo-rate

[7] How Repo Rate Changes Impact the Foreign Investment – https://www.shriramfinance.in/article-repo-rate-and-its-effect-on-foreign-investment-and-currency-stability

[8] The Ripple Effect of Interest Rates: What It Means for Indian – https://www.paytmmoney.com/blog/the-ripple-effect-of-interest-rates-what-it-means-for-indian-investors/

[9] How Does the US Federal Reserve Interest Hike Impact – https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/how-does-the-us-federal-reserve-interest-hike-impact-indian-economy/

[10] Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy – Federal Reserve research on communication strategies

[11] How Different Central Banks Explain QE – Analysis of Federal Reserve vs Bank of England communication approaches

[18] QE Side Effects and Inequality – Research on quantitative easing’s distributional impacts

[28] Inflation and Wealth Inequality – Cross-country panel data study on inflation’s effects on wealth distribution

[29] Billionaire Wealth Increase 2020-2024 – Data on wealth accumulation during pandemic recovery period