Friday, February 27, 2009

The Systemic Failure of Economics

Wow! These guys have a point.

"The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold.

"We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real-world markets."

“In our view, economists, as with all scientists, have an ethical responsibility to communicate the limitations of their models and the potential misuses of their research. Currently, there is no ethical code for professional economic scientists. There should be one.”

“Given the established curriculum of economic programs, an economist would find it much more tractable to study adultery as a dynamic optimization problem of a representative husband, and derive the optimal time path of marital infidelity (and publish his exercise) rather than investigating financial flows in the banking sector within a network theory framework.”


HT: Steve Keen