segunda-feira, 14 de setembro de 2009

Economists and economics: What does the crisis tell us?

Interessante artigo do Spaventa sobre o impacto da crise sobre o Economista.

By now there is little to be added to the narrative of the financial crisis and to the analysis of its proximate and remote causes. A debate on the lessons of the crisis for economics as a discipline and for its practitioners is instead only just beginning. This is the theme of this note, without much pretence to organised thought.
In the past year or so bashing economists has become a fashionable sport. 'Why didn't you tell us?' asked HM the Queen of England when visiting the London School of Economics. An Italian minister said something in Latin which translated into plain English is an injunction to economists to just shut up. Old jokes have been resurrected, sardonic books and articles on the theme written by journalists have come out. Mock trials of the profession have been organised. More seriously, some economists (Daren Acemoglu, Willem Buiter, Paul De Grauwe, Barry Eichengreen, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, Roberto Perotti, Pietro Reichlin, Ignazio Visco, Charles Wyplosz and more) have themselves initiated interesting and thoughtful soul searching exercises, mostly in the form of short papers and OpEd or blog columns. Recently (and after this piece had almost been completed) The Economist (July 18) devoted its main leader and two extensive briefing articles to ‘What went wrong with economics.’
The profession's reaction to these serious and less serious provocations has betrayed embarrassment or has been absent, perhaps in the belief that business as usual, as if nothing had happened, is the best reply. Reputation was not helped by the policy debates that have taken place since mid-2008, where disparate and stridently dissonant pieces of advice were given, belatedly but always with arrogant certainty.

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