Economists aren’t very popular. Dismal scientists, after all, are the kind of experts who don’t know what they’re talking about but make you feel as if that’s your fault. Such bamboozling is often deliberate, especially when it comes to forecasting. Projections and prejudices take on the air of unchallengeable truths when expressed in faux-scientific language and garnished with mathematical hocus-pocus.
As an economist myself, I’d say that one of the few positives from this ghastly sub-prime crisis is that the profession is becoming more humble. Since the credit crunch, the use by economists of ever more complex models, and the increasingly inane assumptions that go with them, has partly reversed. Good.
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