Economists - the dismal soothsayers

Journalists are always wiser after the event . They are the ones calling for the barn doors to be shut after the horse has bolted . We saw this with their belated apologetic excuses when the true story of how they unquestioningly accepted the US/UK version of Iraq WMDs instead of investigating the alternative studies that present a more accurate picture of the situation .
Having accepted Capitalism and its so-called benefits as articles of faith, some journalists are now belatedly re-evaluating their sources . Nick Fraser of The Independent is a good example.

"Economists can seem dogmatic while ceaselessly changing their minds. No wonder that when they are depicted in popular culture, it is as uber-nerds, stuck in their own backrooms and requiring rescuers."

"Economists lent their skills to anticipating the performance of markets, at the price of becoming salesmen. The economist Robert Shiller, who did predict the slump, believes that many pre-slump practitioners in the vicinity suffered from "Groupthink" – a polite way of saying that they were so far in on the game and failed to notice anything was amiss. Dissenters from the prevailing optimism were abused as spoilsports bent on wrecking a good party. As Keating explains, people cease to listen when you write the same memo predicting catastrophe for the fifth time."

"For Robert Skidelsky, author of the biography of John Maynard Keynes, economics consists for the most part of rehashed fads. "A few geniuses aside, economists frame their assumptions to suit existing states of affairs," he says. "They are intellectual butlers, serving the interests of those in power, not vigilant observers of shifting reality. Their systems trap them in orthodoxy.""

"Liaquat Ahamed told me. "Economics doesn't always tell you about what really happens. There are too many theorists, and practitioners concoct them to order. They are a bit like lawyers." For real understanding, Ahamed thinks we have to turn to history."

Ah , yes ...the rest of the article becomes the the now customary homage to Keynes but of Marx - nothing. And of the socialist critique of bourgeois economists - not a whisper , not a whimper . In truth , adding up to nothing more than saying nothing wrong with capitalism , just only its lackeys .

But for the record , what we were saying in 1999:-

"As one millennium closes and another begins the chatter of the economists who have understood little and achieved even less gets more frantic; now they try to rationalise after the event phenomena they neither anticipated nor were able to prevent. Watch them squirm in the broadsheets and the supplements as the millennium draws closer. Socialists, while humble in the knowledge that we have work to do if the revolution we desire is to come to fruition, will be happy to let our record speak for itself."

Economists assume a world full of greedy, aggressive loners, squabbling over "scarce means", they end up with a rag-bag of isolated scenarios and anecdotes. Their world is one of micro events, of isolated phenomena, unrelated to each other. Then, because this does not supply an explanation, many of them move into "econometrics" i.e. algebraic mumbo-jumbo, or computer modelling, GIGO—Garbage In Garbage Out. Since the days of Adam Smith in the 18th century, economists have been trying in vain to find the right combination of knobs, levers, sliders, switches and buttons with which to control the monster reactor of the money and market system. Each would-be economist to the government has to claim that everything is finally figured out. If they admitted that they can't control capitalism, nobody would bother electing these self-styled "market managers" at all.They can't predict what the market will do. And they can't control it anyway.The most enduring thing about capitalism is that its economists , fully recognising what has unfailingly happened in the past, always insist that this time it will be different.

The capitalist system has occupied less than one percent of human existence and it is only by comparing it with other systems—hunter-gatherer, herder, homesteader and possible future societies—that it can be satisfactorily analysed. Bourgeois apologetics usually fight shy of history, of an economic past, since that might imply a (possibly different) future. Comparing our unfree society with autonomous past or future arrangements can permit a better understanding of our present predicament.
There is an alternative to capitalism but no journalists from The Independent are investigating it. Meanwhile millions of words are being ground out by economists in press, radio, television and books, which leave neither them nor us any the wiser.

The real cause of capitalist crises lies in the division of people into producers and consumers: gain for the one is loss for the other, there is no common interest and therefore no community. The disequilibrium that results is at the bottom of all the stop-go, booms and slumps, that characterise the "system" (or lack of one!)

We part company with George Soros, Paul Krugman, and all the other writers and economists who are trying to make sense of what is happening. The mass of facts they produce is not matched by any paradigm or hypothesis to make sense of them, and to guide any action to deal with them.

For the great mass of people we have no choice as long as the market-based system is maintained. The forces driving capitalism do not include wishes. A class-divided society does not have control via feedback, or self-correction, but merely random behaviour like a driverless train, an avalanche, or a rockfall.