The drumbeat of "worse than economists expected" negatively affects the nation's psyche and further depresses the economy. If economists had been better at predicting just how bad things were going to be, things wouldn't have gotten as bad as they have.
What the economy needs, obviously, is economists who will start expecting that the economy will be much worse than economists expect. Only then can we expect the economy to get better.
Seriously? Economics is a social science. As with all sciences, there are disputes. The disputes in some areas of economics are particularly difficult since you can't easily conduct experiments in many cases. This leads to the use of historical data, with the problem being that historical data might include some variables that you are under (or over) accounting for. Hence, the difficulty in agreeing upon controversies within the discipline.
Disagreements, however, are not resolved with this "throw the baby out" line of thinking. And they are definitely not improved by lazy columnists who complain about vague job titles (such as "economist") without explaining the differences that exist within the universe of opinions within those titles. The internet helps those of us in the public interested in learning more (hello Dean Baker, Dani Rodrik, and Brad Delong), but of course some Post Editors have a problem with bloggers too.
No comments:
Post a Comment