Should-Read: Dan Davies, Simon Wren-Lewis, and Policy Sketchbook: “Saying nothing about the importance of financial linkages and imbalances because they didn’t know they were there does not exactly get the profession off the hook!!!”

Should-Read: More economist self-flagellation and self-justification. I kinda think the discussion would be healthier if it recognized, as Samuel Jackson says in Pulp Fiction: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men…”: Dan Davies, Simon Wren-Lewis, and Policy Sketchbook: “Saying nothing about the importance of financial linkages and imbalances because they didn’t know they were there does not exactly get the profession off the hook!!!”:

@dsquareddigest: A very large proportion of the economics profession should have said “our models are clearly inadequate so we will work hard on improving our understanding, in the meantime please listen to this small subset of us who appear to have been right”.

@sjwrenlewis: A very large proportion of the economics profession said nothing about finance and the chance of a crisis, and that includes all the trade economists that should have been listened to over Brexit.

@dsquareddigest: Saying nothing about the importance of financial linkages and imbalances because they didn’t know they were there does not exactly get the profession off the hook!!!

@policysketch: Isn’t the comms challenge here to explain that there are some things we know and many we don’t? A challenge made harder (to continue the medical analogy) by the fact that while some economists are giving out vaccinations and painkillers, others are treating dementia with leeches.

@dsquareddigest: The comms challenge is to understand that this is basically a marketing task trying to get our view over, not a settled science where we can just call people idiots for not listening to us. Not helped by the fact that economists like to call themselves “professionals”, but reject all associated concepts of ethics, standards and discipline…