So I checked out Google scholar and to be honest for the alleged 20 years of being a researcher his contribution to the academic community seems marginal at best. Holding him up to the usual performance metrics, most postdocs in my lab had more citations and I also don’t see articles in big journal. Leaving aside the fact that your whole argument is subject to a logical fallacy your appeal to authority doesn’t seem to appeal to a good authority. He may have been working in the industry and he may have been involved in policy making, but that doesn’t mean he’s any authority when it comes to economics as a scientific discipline.