Saturday, November 01, 2008

Economics not a dismal science, just an useless science :-)

On a few posts, I have made snide remarks about economics. In one entry, I was just short of rolling all over floor laughing at the notion that economics is science! But, I am, after all, not an economist, which means that my remarks are, well, worthless.
So, let us turn to a real expert, James Galbraith, shall we? Here are two of the questions that were posed to him, along with his reponses:

But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis?
Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.

What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?
It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.

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