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By Tim Naegele, in response to Ryan Grim’s Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession.
My sense — having gotten my undergraduate degree in the field from UCLA — is that most economists are incompetent "whores." There is a herd instinct that governs them, and they do not dare to get out of step with their brethren; and they tow the "company line" religiously. Hence, at best some of them are moderately competent in deciphering the past, but utterly incompetent in predicting the future. Rather than be perceived as "wrong," they are like lemmings marching to the sea, in lock step.
That is among the reasons why when one economist with credentials breaks from the pack — as Roubini did before the so-called "recession" was upon us, and says that the emperor has no clothes — he (or she) has such an impact, because the other members of his profession are essentially saying nothing. In a real sense, the profession’s "poster boy" is Alan Greenspan who has admitted that he never saw the housing crisis coming. What planet was he living on?
Ordinary Americans saw the bubble — and all bubbles burst at some point in time, and the bigger the bubble, the deeper the fall — but Greenspan and his brethren missed it. That speaks volumes.
