Junk economics…
Sorry, but Anna Gilmore is still lying about economics
Anna Gilmore, an anti-tobacco activist and “researcher” at the University of Bath (they must be so proud!) is primarily known for doing junk epidemiology but has also branched into junk economics.
(The definitive collection about her can be found at Chris Snowdon’s blog, running a search for her name.)
It is not entirely clear whether she is in the subset of lairs who know they are disseminating disinformation or the subset who claim to be experts but simply have no idea what they are doing.
My assessment, based on her previous foray into economics (see my analysis of it) is that while she seems to be intentionally misleading about epidemiology, in economics she probably never read so much as a first-semester textbook before writing her unintentional comedy.
Her new “contribution” is “Understanding tobacco industry pricing strategy and whether it undermines tobacco tax policy: the example of the UK cigarette market, by Anna B. Gilmore, Behrooz Tavakoly, Gordon Taylor, Howard Reed, about the impact of cigarette tax increases on retail prices.
It was widely laughed at by commentators because the part of her press release that was usually highlighted in the news was that smokers react to price increases by shifting to cheaper products (that is, from premium brands to brands with lower wholesale, and thus after-tax, prices).
The observations were along the lines of “hey, look, Anna Gilmore seems to have learned basic economics!”? But she actually did not.
I do have to give credit to the health reporters on this one.? Not only did they emphasize the one simplistic observation that she got right, but some fixed her false claim “tobacco tax increases are the most effective means of reducing tobacco use” (by “tobacco” she means cigarettes, of course — the standard casual anti-THR lie is thrown in there), making it accurate with “one of the most effective”.
(Basic education about the risks from smoking is, by a huge margin, the most effective way to convince people to not smoke.
Taxes come in third, after promotion of harm reduction.)? Unfortunately, further down in the articles, most of the reporters went on to report her innumerate claims also.
The core of her innumeracy — failure to understand first-semester economics before trying to write about economics — is claiming that the setting new prices after a shock to the market (in this case, a new tax increase) is a matter of complicated volition rather than simple market forces.
She attributes manufacturers’ actions to various nefarious motives, which is perhaps just political lying, but probably is because neither she nor her coauthors understood what they were writing about (and did not stop to think that perhaps University of Bath has an economics department, and that any decent student in it, let alone any professor, could have explained it).
Originally written by Carl V Phillips
