Re: [Pen-l] What good are economists?

[Bill Lear <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 09:37:39 (-0400) fmoseley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>Quoting Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
>> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_17/b4128026997269.htm
>> What Good Are Economists Anyway?
>> Why they failed to predict the global economic crisis,Ab€”and why their 
>> help is still crucial to a recovery
>> By Peter Coy
>>
>> Economists mostly failed to predict the worst economic crisis since 
>> the 1930s. Now they can't agree how to solve it. People are starting 
>> to wonder: What good are economists anyway? A commenter on a housing 
>> blog wrote recently that economists did a worse job of forecasting 
>> the housing market than either his father, who has no formal 
>> education, or his mother, who got up to second grade. "If you are an 
>> economist and did not see this coming, you should seriously 
>> reconsider the value of your education and maybe do something with a 
>> tangible value to society, like picking vegetables," he wrote on 
>> patrick.net.
>
>
>The reason why mainstream macroeconomists failed to predict the current 
>economic crisis, and continue to fail to understand and explain it, is 
>that their THEORIES ARE BAD.  ...

I think this is nonsense.  Plenty of economists used their plain
vanilla economics education to see a bubble forming and warned about
it.  The problem is that most mainstream economists have a religious
devotion to neoliberal "free markets", which when translated to
English means "deregulation, public subsidies, union busting, the
invisible handshake, war, demonizing the poor, a preferential option
for the rich", etc.


Bill

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