Credentials are meaningless. Paul Krugman, for example, has a Nobel prize in economics, but knows nothing about how a free-market economy leads to prosperity. He's been drinking too much of that Keynesian Kool-Aid. If you're unsure about how to "connect the dots", just dig for answers and think things through logically. The light bulb will eventually come on.
Indeed George Bush Sr. despite his own self-proclaimed ignorance of the subject is about the only person to have accurately described it in the last hundred years or so when he correctly identified Reagan's Tory Trotskyite Freidmanist-Menshevism as "Voodoo"