From What went wrong with economics:
In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
Alright, maybe not all of economics is bunk, but I think a lot of macroeconomics was simply invented by economists to justify their own positions. Even economist John Kenneth Galbraith (lousy Keynesian) said:
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
Create an academic field around a small idea and pretty soon your experts in that field will be finding new ways to justify themselves. It’s true in every field. We do this in the name of science, of course, but the trouble is that there aren’t enough people in the world to say “Hey, your entire field of study is stupid and wrong. You’re making things worse.”
Well, I’m going to say it here: Macroeconomists, you’re making it worse. Stop pretending you have answers. You don’t. I don’t either, but I’m not pretending. Stop talking to policy-makers. Tell them that you don’t know and nobody else does either. Tell them that maybe we ought to consider getting out of debt as a country, to spend less than we make, as a lark, you know, to see what happens. Then please find another area of study.
© 2009 Scott Wiersdorf