The financial crisis has killed the claim that economics deserves to be treated as a science. The measure of a science is its capacity to explain, predict, and prescribe. And most economists not only failed to anticipate the nature and evolution of the catastrophe, but their conflicting recommendations exposed the unreliability of their knowledge.
"It is worth remembering that our current mess was caused in large part by the “solutions” used to minimize the end of the dot-com bubble, the Asian financial crisis, and other crashes. These economic maladies were “cured” using medicines that weakened the patient and brought us the current catastrophe. We did not have a Keynes to alert us to the toxicity of the cure. Let’s hope that we will soon get one—or many—of his successors, not only to bail out their profession but, more importantly, to save us from a new crisis created by the solutions to this one.."
Moises Naim is a Venezuelan economist and editor-in-chief of "Foreign Policy."
to read his article published in: Foreign Policy, Jan-Feb 2009, visit
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4606&print=1
Original: Missing Links: An Intellectual Bailout