BROADCASTS.com

b'

[Related:\\xa0Tyler Cowen on rationalists,\\xa0Noah Smith on rationalists,\\xa0Will Wilkinson on rationalists, etc]

If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was \\u201cannoying person who\\u2019s never read any economics, criticizing economists\\u201d, I think I could nail it. I\\u2019d say something like:

Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with \\u2018models\\u2019 based on ideas like \\u2018the only motivation is greed\\u2019 or \\u2018everyone behaves perfectly rationally\\u2019. But they didn\\u2019t predict the housing bubble, they didn\\u2019t predict the subprime mortgage crisis, and they didn\\u2019t predict Lehman Brothers. All they ever do is talk about how capitalism is perfect and government regulation never works, then act shocked when the real world doesn\\u2019t conform to their theories.

This criticism\\u2019s very clichedness should make it suspect. It would be very strange if there were a standard set of criticisms of economists, which practically everyone knew about and agreed with, and the only people who hadn\\u2019t gotten the message yet were economists themselves. If any moron on a street corner could correctly point out the errors being made by bigshot PhDs, why would the PhDs never consider changing?