The Sad State of the Economics Profession

The Market Oracle reports:

When one attains a Ph.D. in physics or medicine, he does not spend time understanding theories from 200 years ago. The profession is always moving forward, right? In economics, we wrongly take the same attitude. Macroeconomics as a profession has not advanced but has regressed. We had a better understanding of macroeconomics 80 years ago. Politicians put Keynes on a pedestal because he gave them the theoretical foundation to justify policies that had been justifiably ridiculed in the past by the classical economists.

These economists such as Smith, Say, Ricardo, and Mill fought hard to dispel the popular misconception that the problem was overproduction and a lack of money. Today, the leading economists are telling us everything will be fine if we can boost demand (hence, too much production) or have more money through quantitative easing. These are the same popular misconceptions promulgated by mercantilists 250 years ago. The difference, today, is that economists are the mercantilists’s ally instead of their enemies.

The role of the economist should be to explain not only the direct effects, but also the indirect effects of economic policies. The economists should not only tell us what is seen, but what is not seen, and more importantly what should be foreseen. Economists in unison should have informed the public that the massive government spending after the crash of 2008 would have created more growth and employment if the money had been left in private hands. To fund “cash for clunkers,” the government borrowed money that would normally have been used to build plants and equipment or capital goods, the real source of growth in an economy. As Murray Rothbard eloquently said, this is a transfer of “resources from the productive [private sector] to the parasitic, counterproductive public sector.”

The economist as apologist and rent-seeker.