By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 13, 2015
One of the many quips ascribed to Winston Churchill is that it was well that Clement Atlee were modest for he had much to be modest about. This article comments on a remarkable article dated September 19, 2009 by the French economist Gilles Saint-Paul that embodies why economics is the only field that purports to be a science that has gotten worse for decades, which actively makes the world worse in its supposed area of expertise, and that is proud of it. I learned of the article through the worthy blog site Unlearning Economics. That site has a special category for theoclasscial sermons, including Saint-Paul’s, that exemplify our family rule that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.
Saint-Paul’s title is “A ‘modest’ intellectual discipline.” Saint-Paul is one of the economists who was an architect of the ongoing disaster, so one could hope that writing in 2009 would have led him to conduct a thorough re-examination of his field’s catastrophic failures. He should have begun with a personal and professional mea culpa and a series of frank admissions as to what caused him and his discipline to fail yet again and cause such great harm to the world. That’s what a representative of a “modest” field that has so very much to be modest about would do.
