from Peter Radford

This is a bit of a rant. Please bear with me.

I rarely do this, but here’s a link to one of my favorite economics blogs:

Unlearning Economics:Economists Dissing Economics

The problem with all this self-criticism is that many of the people doing the dissing are responsible for the disarray they are criticizing. A different view is that none of them saw fit to make enough noise to change things.

This may unfair of me.

Notice also that much of this criticism is dated. The wheels have been coming off economics for a long time, yet inertia is sufficient to prevent change.

This may also be unfair of me.

But, ask yourself: where else in our economy could so much analytical ineptitude be tolerated for so long? Where else could repeated failure be fobbed off so easily? Where else could so much fraction, discord, and general incoherence be treated as a “profession”?

If some of the so-called heterodox alternatives to the dominant theories were so compelling surely they would have been more widely accepted. It is not enough to carp about other people’s evident failings – and believe me, as a relative outsider those failings are glaringly evident – because I believe those who complain have a responsibility to build the better alternative.

Instead we are confronted repeatedly by the same old stuff. The same old utopian nonsense, or the same old half complete theories. For sure, around the fringes there are signs of progress, but mostly they, too, suffer from incompleteness, over reliance on formalism, and, unfortunately too often, a highly naive interpretation of reality.
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