In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon illustrates the classic case of burying the lede for popular economics:
So Dutch consumers are roughly 10% better off than they would have been, but companies have been able to compete only by paring their profit margins.
“The Dutch disease,” The Economist, November 26, 1977
Talk about burying the lede. That sentence appears at the end of the 10th paragraph of the much-referred-to but rarely read article in The Economist that coined the phrase “Dutch Disease.” In the normal course of things, a 10 per cent increase in consumers’ purchasing power would be the stuff of banner headlines, but, for some reason, The Economist chose to hide that point deep into the story and qualify it with a caveat about how hard it had become for companies to compete. (The answer to that, by the way, is: “So what if producers are struggling?” What really matters is consumer welfare.)
My take on the Dutch Disease debate can be summed up as follows: Why are we calling it a disease?
