My Thawtz

The Limitations of Economics …I’m not an economist, but I play one on TV By Jon N. Hall NOTE : This article appeared in March of 2009 at James Glassman’s TCS Daily. I considered updating, rewriting, Americanizing punctuation, and testing the links, but decided to slap it up warts and all, just like I submitted it to Glassman’s now-defunct website. The article, of course, ran during the Great Recession, shortly after the financial crisis: Not so very long ago we often heard this: “The business cycle has been repealed”. Economics, it was suggested, was such a complete, mature science that the experts could engineer “soft landings”, sparing us the pain of recession and the heartache of depression. All we needed to do was put our faith in the economists. This was also about the time we heard about “the end of history”. In a book review from the summer of 1997, economist Paul Krugman wrote:   Anyone who reads the business press knows that the mood these days i...