"Why, despite the financial crisis, do we still put our faith in economists"

Yet another journalist is mystified--mystified!--about why people still pay attention to economists.

Judging by the way the economic fraternity have been treated in the past year or so, you might think so. 2009 ought to have been the year that economists well and truly fell from grace. There is surely adequate ammunition to explode any remaining faith in their powers of prediction: the scale of the economic slump, the rise in unemployment, the fact that a small number of extremely rich people have been getting richer while the majority have suffered. . . .

There is a deep-seated human instinct to seek out oracles, and in a world that is less religious than it once was, in an internet age characterised by a relentless blizzard of information, noise and data, we have become more reliant than ever before on "experts": anyone with qualifications or distinctions which make them worthy of attention. 

Here's another hypothesis: to paraphrase Winston Churchill, economics is the worst social science except for all the others.

Comments

[kyle8]

What total pile of crap. There were numerous economists who predicted everything that happened. I, myself, with only a bachelors degree in economics saw enough to hold off on buying real estate, increase my savings, and purchase some gold.

I started doing this in 2007 because it didn't take a genius to see that excessive borrowing, and a real estate market whose prices had no bearing with reality was unsustainable.

[Speedmaster]

>> "Yet another journalist is mystified--mystified!--about why people still pay attention to economists."

Apparently, they weren't listening to Ron Paul or anyone from the Austrian school. ;-)

[Mike Mathea]

Apparently the journalist does not remember a basic economic truth. The price mechanism determines value.
Free information has little value.

[JorgXMcKie]

I'm pretty amazed, given the past 30 years or so, that anyone is still paying attention to journalists.
"There is surely adequate ammunition to explode any remaining faith in their powers of ..." so we should rely on "expert" journos? Boy, that's rich. I wonder if he has a single clue why the "news" business is tanking?

[athena]

Garbage in garbage out. If the media focuses on the political hack economists then they get lousy data.

[Clint]

I agree with kyle8. Many were predicting the housing bubble even before Greenspan left office. The problem was that policy makers didn't want to listen. For some reason they don't like to cut spending.

For better or worse, our political system is generally reactionary.