POPULISM RULES, Economics sucks.
Aa lifelong economist, I am distraught at what is happening to my profession. What I observe is economists losing status. Economists used to be highly respected figures, and nowadays, even when they are not pilloried, they are often simply ignored. There is an ongoing bipartisan flight from economic reasoning. And as voters go to the polls this week, neither Republicans nor Democrats are offering anything like a rigorous plan for economic growth.
I mean, not unfairly. Yes, economics is the queen of the social sciences and should be ruling shit... but economists, especially in the higher echelons of the professions and policy specifically, have made a complete mess of things (tariffs, runaway deficits, MMT nonsense -- which fair enough, is the media's and the retard leftwingers' #1603339 fault and not the profession's -- central bank insanity, botched pandemic shite, inflaaaation).
It'd be a miracle if the profession responsible for the last ~20 years of economic policy was NOT losing credibility and respect
Tyler romanticizes quite bit about the 1960s, with JFK and LBJ bringing in hot-shot economists with "significant academic heft"
That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent.
Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet.
I read this insane bit in Wigglesworth's bond book (#1588691) this morning about the Liberty Bonds -- the marshalling of public resources to defeat the evil Kaiser during World War I... it's astonishing to see the unity:
can you imagine this sort of insane, unifying national fervor today, raising funds for war?!
Cowen continues with the 1980s, and Martin Feldstein who's two "junior economists" (Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers) became more famous and successful than him.
......
...and then I got paywalled. Nobody puts Den in Paywall corner!
archive, nah; but SMRY to the partial rescue! https://smry.ai/item/open?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefp.com%2Fp%2Ftyler-cowen-economics-populism-midterms&smryFrom=home
But it's a Tyler column, so we can safely assume it went absolutely nowhere. Buhu, econ profession.
If the most prominent voices in our profession hadn't decided to be regime apologists to curry favor with the ruling class for the past several decades, perhaps the public would hold us in higher esteem.
I was thinking about how crazy it would seem if all our best athletes were shipped off to war. That actually happened within living memory for some folks.
Economists made their bed with the Klaus Schwabs of the world, so they deserve it.
Weren't the "Economists who used to be highly respected figures" simply just the ones hired to be the state's salesmen and marketers and to give a "scientific" and "expert" backing to the spending and agenda du jour?
And markets will pump. They hate uncertainty