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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
 Posted - 03/09/2009 : 22:40:15
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Just read "Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy," which shows that economists, like scientists, take a lot of convincing before changing their minds. Even though I disagree with some aspects of free-market theory, the fact that the current crisis is not making academic economists panic and chuck the model out the window is a good thing. They, like scientists faced with an anomalous result, want to find out what really happened before saying that the current paradigm is so out-of-touch with reality that it needs to be discarded. This behavior might look dogmatic at first, but only time (lots of time) will tell.
Personally, I think the best rebuttal to the idea that the current crisis is a failure of free-market theory is that the markets we have are hardly "free." But that's probably a back-handed indictment of the model itself, since it's pretty much the only model being taught these days (so if it doesn't match reality, then it's worthless). Then again, that is one of my problems with it in the first place (especially the idea that people are rational actors within the market), so maybe that's why we're not hearing that complaint all the time.
Again: time will tell.
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