Krugman: More on the Great Retrogression!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

The sorry state of the expert class: Krugman offers another post about what he calls "the retrogression of economics." In this case, Mark Thoma shoots down a Wall Street Journal piece which misrepresents the views of Krugman and Jamie Galbraith.

"You keep getting economists dismissing Keynesian economics based on what they think they heard somebody say Keynesian economics is all about," Krugman writes. "Something very bad has happened to this discipline." On the other hand, is anyone surprised when WSJ opinion pieces are full of baldly ridiculous crap? We're not sure why this example counts as anything more than the latest partisan bullroar.

Elsewhere, the state of the nation's expertise seems to be non-existent, often in ways which aren't especially partisan. We're thinking of our so-called "educational experts," who never seem to foresee or understand any events, who praise the data from the NAEP but never seem to notice what those data seem to show. Beyond that, the work of the professoriate is often amazingty weak when the professors show up on newspaper op-ed pages (see Melissa Harris-Perry this week). And the journalistic elite is stunningly inept, has been for a long time.

Our expert elites seem to function extremely poorly. Can modern nations function this way? We hope Krugman will continue to discuss this problem as it exists within the dismal field.