Dismal Scientists

Dismal Scientists

There’s an old joke that goes: “even if you laid all the world’s economists end to end, head to feet, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.”

Practitioners of the dismal science haven’t done much to improve that reputation during the past year. In fact, it’s been remarkable how many of the top minds in the field have consistently disagreed on the cause, the nature and the solution of this economic crisis.

The differences are clearly on view at, of all places, The New York Review of Books, which recently organised a conference to debate the issue. On the panel were  former U.S. senator Bill Bradley, historian Niall Ferguson, Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman  and his researcher at Princeton University Robin Wells, financier George Soros and the man who has built a reputation on apparently seeing it all coming, economist Nouriel Roubini.

If you don’t have time to read it all, you can get the full flavour of the exchanges on show at Krugman’s own website, where he accuses Ferguson of  ”Gratuitous Ignorance” and marvels at how economics can still be so misunderstood and misrepresented, even among the best educated.