Gillian added a crucial qualifier: improved understanding of the public by those in finance was every bit as important as improved public understanding of finance. I think this is bang on and not just in the field of finance. Listening is every bit as important as talking when it comes to public policy. The most important reason for this is the most obvious – as policymakers, we stand to learn something. Indeed, because the voices of non-experts are rarely heard and are likely to convey different information than that available from experts, we potentially stand to learn a lot. This is not just conjecture. Statistical studies, drawn from a great many different environments and involving very different decisions, show it to be the case. Expert opinion is an essential starting point for good decision-making. But only a starting point. The judgements of experts can be improved materially by drawing on the views of non-experts. 46  Doing so is the key to what Philip Tetlock calls “super-forecasting.”  More fundamentally, non-experts are us. By numbers, if not salaries, they represent almost all of society. Non-experts do most of the spending and saving in the economy, shaping its growth. It is their wage and inflation expectations that determine whether central banks meet their inflation targets. And it is their trust that needs to be nurtured, and recaptured, if policy institutions are to maintain their legitimacy. Yet extracting views on the economy from non-experts is not easy.

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