Dean Baker: The Soft Bigotry of Incredibly Low Expectations: The Case of Economists

[marmar]

from HuffPost:




In a country with almost 15 million people out of work, it is amazing that any economists still have jobs. This one is their fault first and foremost. Economists are supposed to know about the economy and provide advice on how to avoid disasters before they happen and help us recover from the bad things happen in spite of good advice.

The economics profession has not done well on this simple scorecard. Remarkably, rather than improve their game, economists are now busy dampening down expectations so that the public will not hold them responsible for the state of the economy.

Towards this end, a group of Fed economists recently put out a new studyclaiming that it was impossible for economists to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble before it wrecked the economy. In effect, they argued that economists should not be blamed for this failure because:

"The state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006."

This raises the obvious question: if economists can't see an $8 trillion housing bubble, what can they see? This is bit like the firehouse where everyone sits around calmly sipping their coffee as the school across the street burns down. Completely missing the largest financial bubble in the history of the world is pretty inexcusable, even if economists continue to make excuses.

Having failed to prevent disaster, economists are now anxious to tell us that there is nothing that they can do to remedy the situation. The story they are pushing is the unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This means that people are not unemployed because of a lack of demand in the economy, but rather they are unemployed because there is a mismatch between the available jobs and the skills and location of the available workers. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/the-soft-bigotry-of-incre_b_715276.html

[Demeter]

1. The Only REAL Economist Out There in Politics Is Elizabeth Warren

which is why the White House avoids her like the plague. Also why the WH ignores Volcker, Dean Baker, Roubini, Taibbi, and anyone else who could poke a hole in their tissue of lies.

[burnsei sensei]

2. We have intellectual cowardice in the

corridors of power.

[xchrom]

3. If they're not cowards -- they're convinced.

True believers in institutions that are not working
For the General Welfare of The People.

[Xolodno]

4. Horse Shit...

When you listen to economist like minded of the Chicago School and dismiss the rest as being "socialist"....what do you expect?