There must be some dark corner of Hell warming up for modern, mainstream economists. They helped bring on the worst bubble ever… with their theories of efficient markets and modern portfolio management. They failed to see it for what it was. Then, when trouble came, they made it worse. But instead of atoning in a dank cell, these same economists strut onto the stage to congratulate themselves.
The scalawag himself. Keynes provided governments with the “scientific” fig leaf fore interventionism that economists had previously denied them. The cost in terms of economic and technological progress is incalculable. Photo via MIT Press
“The Greatest Depression that could so easily have happened in 2009 but did not is the tribute that the world owes to economics”, wrote Arvind Subramanian in The Financial Times.
Arvind Subramanian: congratulating mainstream economists (a sub-set of society that includes him) for failing to foresee a mess their own advice has produced. The chutzpa of this guy is really admirable. He is of course correct that it is difficult to make forecasts (in fact, economics as a science has nothing to do with making predictions), but anyone who didn’t see the 2008 crisis coming had to be blind as a fricking bat. Even housewives could see it coming, but a very long list of prominent professional economists and “policymakers” evidently couldn’t. Fine, but these are the same people that insist that they know what to do about it. That is decidedly not so. They have now produced what will turn out to be an even greater mess. Photo credit: Bijoy Ghosh
We were lost from the get-go, trying to interpret the sentence. It is as tangled and puerile as the staggering conceit behind it. Then, Mr. Subramanian sets up the stage props:
