Chakraborrty and the big bad economist

I wonder if sometime in the past an academic economist did something bad to Aditya Chakrabortty. It's the best explanation I can come up with as to why  the Guardian's senior economic commentator  keeps banging on about the alleged deficiencies of academic economics. He's at it again today. What puzzles me is the complete irrationality of his argument, such as it is. If you believe him, then economics or "liberal economics" is something that the "mainstream" all agree about and includes a conspiracy to keep out heterodox approaches. He even cites Krugman but seems not to have noticed that Krugman's column is full of policy debate in which people have either explicitly or implicity quite different models in mind of how the economy works and these lead to diametrically opposed policy recomendations. How is this possible if in their student days they were all "lobotomised" into conformity?

 

Yes, economic knowledge is more codified than sociological or anthropological knowledge. Yes, there is more formalisation (which in most sciences is regarded as a good thing rather than a bad thing). Yes, learning economics requires serious effort and the taking, in the first place, of small steps. So what? Do they let 1st year physicists loose at CERN or ask 2nd year medics to do open heart surgey? In any serious subject you serve an apprenticeship during which time you work on small tractable problems, many of which have standard solutions. Only once you've mastered them do you move on the messy complexity of the real world.  If you want to have the feeling that you are solving all the worlds problems five minutes after you have entered the economics 101 classroom perhaps you should opt for sociology 101 classroom down the corridor. One of the best attended lecture courses at the LSE when I taught there was given by a sociologist. Students left it feeling that they understood everything they needed to know about how the world worked and how everything that had happened in the last 200 years led inexorably up to now. I don't think that many (any?) of the students sitting in that room can be counted among the great movers and shakers of today. Feeling you understand or comprehend something is different from demonstrating you do.

 

Yes economists can be annoying, especially the ones that insist  on prefacing every sentence with "I'm an economist" before telling you that you are doing everything wrong - usually because they haven't bothered to understand the nature of your problem or even worse recommending you a recent paper by an economist that has discovered a new problem/solution without bothering to mention that the problem/solution has already been discussed/solved in the statistics/sociology/psychology literatures. But these are just bad scholars and bad scholars are not a reason to think that a whole discipline is no good. That's just lazy playing to the gallery.