I had the distinct pleasure of taking a class from Professor McCloskey at the University of Iowa (Western Civilization, I believe), one of those 200+ student undergrad lecture affairs. He (she was a he, then) had certain rules, though, I will never forget: if you came to lecture (and he stated he didn’t really care if you did or not, we were “adults”) you were to be politely silent (unless, I suppose, asking a question, which rarely occurred), and, most importantly, you were not to sit and read the newspaper, which, at Iowa, was the Daily Iowan, a full-sized fold-out newspaper on the order of a Chicago Tribune (you couldn’t read that one, or any other one either). Students forgetting this rule were ejected from the lecture by Professor McCloskey; I remember it happening only once. But I digress.
The reason for this post is Professor McCloskey nails it: economics as practiced today is a sham and a waste of time with all the math and alleged “science.” To wit:
The progress of economic science has been seriously damaged. You can’t believe anything that comes out of [it]. Not a word. It is all nonsense, which future generations of economists are going to have to do all over again. Most of what appears in the best journals of economics is unscientific rubbish. I find this unspeakably sad. All my friends, my dear, dear friends in economics, have been wasting their time….They are vigorous, difficult, demanding activities, like hard chess problems. But they are worthless as science.
The physicist Richard Feynman called such activities Cargo Cult Science….By “cargo cult” he meant that they looked like science, had all that hard math and statistics, plenty of long words; but actual science, actual inquiry into the world, was not going on. I am afraid that my science of economics has come to the same point.
— (Deirdre McCloskey, The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), 41,
The irony, of course, is that a vastly superior form of economics preceded the dastardly Keynes, but is largely unheard of today and certainly untaught in all our finer (and not-so-fine) institutions of “higher learning”: The Austrian School. Learn all about its logical goodness here.
Sins of Economics and Economists
I had the distinct pleasure of taking a class from Professor McCloskey at the University of Iowa (Western Civilization, I believe), one of those 200+ student undergrad lecture affairs. He (she was a he, then) had certain rules, though, I will never forget: if you came to lecture (and he stated he didn’t really care if you did or not, we were “adults”) you were to be politely silent (unless, I suppose, asking a question, which rarely occurred), and, most importantly, you were not to sit and read the newspaper, which, at Iowa, was the Daily Iowan, a full-sized fold-out newspaper on the order of a Chicago Tribune (you couldn’t read that one, or any other one either). Students forgetting this rule were ejected from the lecture by Professor McCloskey; I remember it happening only once. But I digress.
The reason for this post is Professor McCloskey nails it: economics as practiced today is a sham and a waste of time with all the math and alleged “science.” To wit:
The irony, of course, is that a vastly superior form of economics preceded the dastardly Keynes, but is largely unheard of today and certainly untaught in all our finer (and not-so-fine) institutions of “higher learning”: The Austrian School. Learn all about its logical goodness here.