Cleaning Up after Economists’ Great Disservice to Mankind

Spotted over at Jesse’s Cafe, this video of Robert Johnson, Economist and Director of INET (the Institute for New Economic Thinking) details the major failings of the economics profession in recent years, namely, serving power rather than people while functioning as marketing vehicles for Wall Street and seeing the world exclusively through models rather than conducting more research.  

At about the 4:30 mark, Johnson talks about how modeling the economy has recently become more important than studying it and this brings to mind the first comment on this item over at the mainly macro blog the other day Macroeconomists: Scientists or Engineers? by one Ritholtz:

Economists are neither Engineers nor Scientists, as each of these fields has a significant degree of precision in what they do, and test their hypotheses in a lab.

The better choice for Economists are “Historian” or “Sociologists.”

The sooner the profession loses its “physics penis-envy”, the better off we all will be . . .

Well put…