Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: Economists vs. Economics

Must-Read: As I see it, John Maynard Keynes was right when he wrote that “good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel!” The problem is that a good economist needs to be able to:

1. Be willing to do their homework in learning about both the economic literature and the world.
2. Assess and understand the classes of models that are good candidates to use in understanding a particular situation.
3. Reach a judgment on which of those models is the one that best applies.
4. Understand how the model works.
5. Communicate (1), (2), and (3) to the world.

Dani Rodrik: Economists vs. Economics: “Navigating among economic models–choosing which one will work better…

…is considerably more difficult than choosing the right map. Practitioners use a variety of formal and informal empirical methods with varying skill. And, in my forthcoming book Economics Rules, I criticize economics training for not properly equipping students for the empirical diagnostics that the discipline requires. But the profession’s internal critics are wrong to claim that the discipline has gone wrong because economists have yet to reach consensus on the ‘correct’ models (their preferred ones of course). Let us cherish economics in all its diversity–rational and behavioral, Keynesian and Classical, first-best and second-best, orthodox and heterodox–and devote our energy to becoming wiser at picking which framework to apply when.