There have been lots of reactions about the role of economists to the recent world financial crisis; inflation, food hike, increase of poverty rate etc. I thought about it, when I was reading this story of John Reed as Citicorp CEO from the book "Origin of Wealth", that economists do not efficiently represent the world in times of economic crisis. You can read the story to better understand the thread;
"In 1970, Citicorp, along with other major American bank had lent aggressively to the government of developing countries, in particular to those in latin America. Reed’s predecessor, Walter Wriston, had proclaimed that such lending was “safe banking” be soverign government did not default on their debts. Wriston was proved badly wrong. When in August 1982 the Mexican government was unable to roll over its massive debt This set of a chain of event that resulted global financial crisis. The next several years saw widespread defaults, currency devaluation, and economic collapse in several countries. When the dust settled, millions of poor people found themselves poorer and banks found that $300 billion had evaporated from their balance sheet. Citicorp alone lost $1billion in a year and was sitting on 13billion in bad debts".
Few questions from ReedReed wanted to know how it happened? how the crisis had happened? and how it could be prevailed from happening again? He consulted several experts, involving leading economists from Academic, Wall Street and government. Reed himself was well versed in economics from his student days at MIT. Yet the economists had little new or useful to say about the crisis. In fact reed believed that their recommendation during the crisis had been dead wrong.
Reed wanted a new way of doing things in economics, the old methods doesn't contribute to positive changes.
think of it, a high number of the ideas of the industry or fields are more than 100 years old. Then the economics formal theory and mathematical theory are now handicapped by impractical assumptions or directly contradicted by real world data.
What do you think about economists, who study the theories of economics and brag about being vast in the study of economics, yet doesn't help or contribute sufficiently to control or stop world economic meltdown?