Econ Critics Are Stuck in the Past
Most of the broadsides ignore how much the field has changed.
In last July, writer and researcher John Rapley penned an article in the British newspaper the Guardian entitled “How Economics Became a Religion.” This followed on the heels of shorter but equally acerbic critiques by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian and Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, earlier that year. In 2015, the Guardian published an article by Joris Luyendijk called “Don’t let the Nobel prize fool you. Economics is not a science,” while Liam Halligan had a similar piece in the Telegraph in 2013.
Annoyed with how standardized -- and how inaccurate -- this type of broadside had become, I wrote a response. I listed some mathematical econ theories that had enjoyed great predictive success in the real world, demonstrated that economics has become a much more empirically grounded discipline and showed evidence that economists were mostly not cheerleaders for unregulated markets.