What does Krugman mean by "imperfect reality" in this sentence: "Economists trying to take account of imperfect reality faced ... " ?
Gene On Sep 14, 2014, at 9:01 PM, Eubulides <[email protected]> wrote: > [And this from a man who has railed against the notion of “economic policy” > as a morality play. Sin and epistemology, indeed. Well before I was born, > ‘the positivists’ had massive arguments over the so-called boundary between > metaphysics and science; the legal profession, between the public and the > private. And yet, today, we get the same old tired partitioning in order to > sustain a pantina of disciplinary expertise under the guise of a confession. > Foucault is howling…] > > http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/opinion/paul-krugman-how-to-get-economic-policy-wrong.html > > How to Get It Wrong > SEPT. 14, 2014 > Paul Krugman > > Last week I participated in a conference organized by Rethinking Economics, a > student-run group hoping to promote, you guessed it, a rethinking of > economics. And Mammon knows that economics needs rethinking in the wake of a > disastrous crisis, a crisis that was neither predicted nor prevented. > > It seems to me, however, that it’s important to realize that the enormous > intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels. Clearly, > economics as a discipline went badly astray in the years — actually decades — > leading up to the crisis. But the failings of economics were greatly > aggravated by the sins of economists, who far too often let partisanship or > personal self-aggrandizement trump their professionalism. Last but not least, > economic policy makers systematically chose to hear only what they wanted to > hear. And it is this multilevel failure — not the inadequacy of economics > alone — that accounts for the terrible performance of Western economies since > 2008. > > In what sense did economics go astray? Hardly anyone predicted the 2008 > crisis, but that in itself is arguably excusable in a complicated world. More > damning was the widespread conviction among economists that such a crisis > couldn’t happen. Underlying this complacency was the dominance of an > idealized vision of capitalism, in which individuals are always rational and > markets always function perfectly. > > [snip] > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
