Greetings good citizen,

How about that, the markets went on another tear while the blogosphere was full of nothing but bad news, most of it concerning bank/governmental fraud.

You all know how one thing leads to another, well I encountered [a href =" http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_17/b4128026997269.htm?chan="magazine+channel_top+stories/"] this piece [/a] over at Some Assembly Required and it set my warped mind to thinking…and we all know how dangerous that is!

At the heart of this trash talking of economists was a rather fundamental issue, the one of ‘basic assumptions’ that economists use to model their theories.

My feeble mind slipped into overdrive and I found myself wondering if an economist’s basic assumption were ones where the individual exercised ‘free-will’ or one of the ‘captive audience’?

There are very few actors in the marketplace that possesses ‘free-will’; the vast majority of us are more like cattle in a chute. (But unlike real cattle, we don’t die, we just keep getting ‘slaughtered’.)

Perhaps it is more appealing for economists to concern themselves with the acts of a significantly smaller group, even if their actions threaten the larger ‘herd’.

While deregulation has ruled the marketplace for the past thirty years, the chute remains the same as it ever was. Your choices are so limited that many of them are made for you.

Perhaps the economists would be better served to observe and predict movements from the reactions of the ‘choice challenged’ working class rather than attempting to ‘read the minds’ of freedom loving investor class?

That said, I don’t think we have a genuine case of ‘cluelessness’ on our hands as much as a situation where the ‘truth’ wouldn’t be particularly appreciated by the people that make endowments to universities or to the ‘think tanks’ or banks that employ economists.

This is likely true of the media as well, where those who own the media cut the paychecks for those who report the news.

Beginning to feel a bit more ‘captive’, good citizen?

It doesn’t always start the same, but for some bizarre reason, it always ends the same.

The people ‘entrusted’ with the ‘levers of power’ inevitably make decisions that benefit themselves. It starts off small, with little crimes that make things a little worse…but emboldened by their ‘success’, the crimes become progressively larger.


No longer satisfied with a taste, they grab onto fist fulls.

Worse, the longer it goes on, the more ‘acceptable’ it becomes. What was once an illicit little ‘perk’ becomes ‘the way we’ve always done it.’

Only in the enforcement arena does this practice ‘trickle down’ to the people at the bottom. A larger slice for themselves is what primarily motivates rookies to advance up the chain of command.

In the ‘private sector’, this practice dries up at the ‘executive suite.’ A workers job is all the ‘reward’ they need, which is why they are constantly being threatened with job loss.

How does that axiom go? A man will believe pretty much anything if his continued livelihood depends on believing it.

How shameful is it that right and wrong is what divides the ‘chumps’ from the ‘wise guys’?

We’ve strayed a ways from the original topic, how economists can keep getting it so wrong and still keep their jobs…or have we?

There were a slew of economists that predicted the ‘recession’ would be old news by the second quarter of last year…and another who think it will be over by the second half of this year.

Then you get ‘non-economists’ like myself who predict this won’t end ‘period’ (for a vast majority of us.)

We will be plagued with what the government terms ‘discouraged workers’ until the global economic system collapses completely.

There are some Nobel Laureates that are hinting at precisely this outcome. What makes these respected individuals voice such outrageous claims? They are courageous enough to speak the truth, that the law is unwilling to do what is necessary to restore order.

Unremarkably, both of these brave individuals are ‘economists’…proving the profession is neither clueless nor a waste.

It takes an enormous amount of integrity to stand athwart a profession that rewards conformity and punishes dissent.

No irony should be lost on the fact that ‘conformity’ it the cudgel the elite use to perpetuate their ‘go along to get along’ culture.

If you aren’t a ‘wise guy’, then you’re a chump…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner