Has anyone read John Cassidy's piece in the 12/2/96 New Yorker.
"The Decline of Economics"? It's a bunch of fluff, but there are
some choice quotes:
"Is economics making enough progress to justify the millions of
dollars a year that the taxpayer spends to subsidize economic
research? the answer is no... Economists are like dairy farmers.
We think we deserve every penny we get... We need more
well-trained high-school teachers of economics, not more Ph.D
economists."
-- Greg Mankiw
"I write down a bunch of equations, and I say this equation has to
do with people's preferences and the equation is a description of
the technology. But this doesn't make it so. Maybe I'm right,
maybe I'm wrong. That has to be a matter of evidence. ...Monetary
shocks just aren't that important. That's the view I've been
driven to. There's no question, that's a retreat in my views."
-- Robert Lucas
"Because of [Robert] Lucas and others, for two decades no graduate
students were trained who were capable of competing with us by
building econometric models that had a hope of explaining short-run
output and price dynamics. We educated a lot of macroeconomists
who were trained to do only two things - teach macroeconomics to
graduate students and publish in the journals."
-- Laurence Meyer
Even on Wall Street, which has traditionally provided a rewarding
outlet for economists, there has been a reaction against the
subject. Morgan Stanley, for example will not hire economics
Ph.D's unless they also have substantial experience outside
academe. "We insist on at least a three-to-four-year cleansing
experience to neutralize the brainwashing that takes place in these
graduate programs."
-- Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley Economist
