WHY ECONOMISTS SCREWED UP SO BADLY

Uwe E. Reinhardt, NY Times - Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming - and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for his academic research on the Great Depression, was notably not among them. Alas, for the real world, the few who did warn us about the train wreck got no more respect from the rest of their colleagues or from decision-makers in business and government than prophets usually do.

How could the economics profession have slept so soundly right into the middle of the economic mayhem all around us? Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, one of the sage prophets. . . finds an explanation in groupthink, a term popularized by the social psychologist Irving L. Janis. In his book "Groupthink", the latter had theorized that most people, even professionals whose careers ostensibly thrive on originality, hesitate to deviate too much from the conventional wisdom, lest they be marginalized or even ostracized.

If groupthink is the cause, it most likely is anchored in what my former Yale economics professor Richard Nelson (now at Columbia University) has called a "vested interest in an analytic structure," the prism through which economists behold the world.

This analytic structure, formally called "neoclassical economics," depends crucially on certain unquestioned axioms and basic assumptions about the behavior of markets and the human decisions that drive them. After years of arduous study to master the paradigm, these axioms and assumptions simply become part of a professional credo. Indeed, a good part of the scholarly work of modern economists reminds one of the medieval scholastics who followed St. Anselm's dictum "credo ut intellegam": "I believe, in order that I may understand."