So, the evaluation report of IMF is out, and says all sorts of negative things about how the financial crisis in the Euro area was handled; basically that the stability of the Euro area was more justified by group thinking than by economic evidence.

This is a nice complement to the Chilcot report on the Iraqi war, recently published in the UK. They certainly shows the importance of policy evaluation. Taken together, both reports appear as a serious hit at “Blair-style” left wing parties, which are both pro-austerity and pro-american.

I haven’t read the report yet but I am fascinated by this accusation of group thinking as opposed to evidence. In fact, Kuhn shows well how, even in hard sciences, group thinking is an integral part of the scientific process. The evidence about the centrality of the sun was available long before Copernicus. The “paradigm shifts” are not simply caused by the evidence accumulated, but by a cultural shift of the scientific community.

So is the accusation legitimate? What is the line between group thinking and scientific consensus, especially in soft sciences? And where does the Washington consensus stand in this continuum?