"Busy week, busy day, so no time to say much right now. But the comments on this one might be better left to all of you in any case:
A People’s Economics, by Robert J. Shiller, Commentary, Project Syndicate: We are in the midst of a boom in popular economics: books, articles, blogs, public lectures, all followed closely by the general public.
I recently participated in a panel discussion of this phenomenon at the American Economic Association annual meeting... An apparent paradox emerged...: the boom in popular economics comes at a time when the general public seems to have lost faith in professional economists... So, why is the public buying more books by professional economists?
The most interesting explanation I heard was that economics has become more interesting, because it no longer seems to be a finished and closed discipline. ...
The financial crisis delivered a fatal blow to ... overconfidence in scientific economics. It is not just that the profession didn’t forecast the crisis. Their models, taken literally, sometimes suggested that a crisis of this magnitude couldn’t happen.
One way to interpret this is that the economics profession was not fully accounting for the economy’s human element, an element that can’t be reduced to mathematical analysis. ...
Of course, economics is in many ways a science, and the work of our scholars and their computer models really does matter. But, as the economist Edwin R. A. Seligman put it in 1889, “Economics is a social science, i.e., it is an ethical and therefore an historical science….It is not a natural science, and therefore not an exact or purely abstract science.”
To me, and no doubt to the other panelists, part of the process of pursuing the inexact aspects of economics is speaking honestly to the broader public, looking them in the eye, learning from them, reading the emails they send, and then searching one’s soul to decide whether one’s favored theory is really close to the truth..."
at http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/01/shiller-a-peoples-economics.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+%28Economist%27s+View+%28EconomistsView%29%29
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