Reliance On Experts

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I have no idea how the economy works. I have no idea what the definition of "the economy" is. I have no idea what causes gas prices to go up and down. Could I learn these things? If they are in fact definable and learnable, then of course. But instead, I choose to trust experts to predict whether or not the economy will be good or bad in 6 months or a year from now. The criteria that I use to determine whether or not an expert is trustworthy is probably flawed. I can either spend time to determine effective criteria for distributing trust, or I can dig into the topic myself and learn about it more deeply. Any alternative to those two things is laziness, and if I feel that something is important enough to pay attention to, I have no option but to either have a framework for evaluating experts, or a lot of coffee and time to start learning about yield curves.

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