Economists vs. Economics

[Valin]

The American Spectator:

Ryan Young
7.21.10

Has the financial crisis ruined economics? Not only did economists fail to predict it, nobody seems to have a clue how to right the ship. Unemployment went up despite hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus spending. Tinkering with interest rates and the money supply hasn't worked, either. The dismal science now has a dismal reputation. But economics itself isn't to blame. Economists are.

Everybody knows that economists are terrible at predicting the future. If the price of pencils goes up, people buy less of them. If the price goes down, more. Economists can predict that much. But they can't say by how much. That would require a depth of knowledge known only to the divine.

They would have to know to the shape and the slope of hundreds of millions of ever-changing individual demand curves for pencils at any given moment. The elasticity of demand for the same. They need the same information for competing products, like pens. Nobody has that kind of information. Nobody can predict the future.

Many economists pretend otherwise. They revel in seeing themselves on the TV and in print. They preach to all, "I have the answer!" They are liars. As with most liars, they get caught. And people stop listening.....(Snip)