THERE WAS A TIME when I believed that psychiatrists and their little cousins, psychologists, were the most unreliable predictors of the future on the planet. I was dead wrong. The most untrustworthy futurists infecting our daily life are the economists. As far as I’m concerned, the very term economist is just as pejorative a moniker as politician. The fact that the latter group makes decisions based upon the analysis of the former group only exacerbates the situation.
On the TV political talk shows, the most heated arguments occur when they have two economists on simultaneously. These guys are more contentious than mixed martial arts fighters. Their outrage at what they perceive as the false prophecies of the other often leave the show moderators at a loss to control the program.
Economic theories and schools of thought run the gamut from Keynes to Friedman and back again. Some insist that free-market economies never go astray, some that economies may stray occasionally but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and should be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Notwithstanding all the “expert” analysis, our economy still goes off the rails occasionally and has to be righted, while one party’s “experts” struggle toward possible recovery and the other party’s naysayers insist the recovery has been “too slow.” Whatever that means.
One school of economists says the other offers “schlock economics,” while the other group says its disparagers deal in “discredited fairy tales” (e.g. trickle-down economics). But despite whatever predictive rabbits the economists pull out of their hats (or some other place), stuff happens: the limitations of human rationality; institutions run amok; market imperfections that produce sudden, unpredictable crashes; and regulators who don’t regulate.
I’m not sure which is worse: printing more money or producing more economists. No matter where they went to school, their tarot cards still get worn out in short order.
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