Paul Krugman, on the crisis in the economics profession:
There are also many calls for new economic thinking; there’s even an institute dedicated to that project. Again, fine — but the biggest problem we had as a profession wasn’t failure to keep up with a changing world, it was failure to remember what our fathers learned.
What we really need is a change in the destructive social dynamics that brought us to this point. And I wish I knew how to do that. But my problem is obvious: I’m an economist, and it seems that we need some kind of sociologist to solve our profession’s problems.
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Always a sad state of affairs when a call goes out to sociologists to provide help!
“There are also many calls for new economic thinking; there’s even an institute dedicated to that project. Again, fine — but the biggest problem we had as a profession wasn’t failure to keep up with a changing world, it was failure to remember what our fathers learned.”
No Paul, the biggest problem is the failure to keep up with a changing world, namely the 1971 departure from the gold standard to Monetary Sovereignty. Old-line economists remember too well what their fathers learned, and haven’t learned anything since, much less “new economic thinking.”
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell