Reality mugs mainstream economist – what it means for investors

A conservative is just a liberal (socialist) who has been mugged by reality. Reality can sometimes change an old economist, too. That happened to Richard Bookstaber and he writes about it in his latest book The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction.

Bookstaber, a Ph.D. in economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ran risk management for Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers and Bridgewater and worked at the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is now the chief risk officer for the investments office of the University of California. Not a bad resume. He has a message for mainstream economists – the weakest part of mainstream economics is the math:

We are not robots with fixed, mechanistic responses to inputs. We face a changing world that, in turn, changes the context with which we view the world, and that changes us, again all the more so during periods of crisis. The critical implication is that we cannot plug numbers into a model and solve for the future. We cannot know where we will end up until we take the journey. And we cannot retake that journey once completed.

Mamas don’t let your babies turn out to be economists

The credibility of mainstream economics took a punishing punch from the Great Recession that hit in 2008. It should have been a fatal blow, but the profession had made itself nearly impervious to the effects of empirical data. The field took so much criticism that Harvard economist Dani Rodrik decided to write a book to defend it - Economic Rules: the rights and wrongs of the dismal science.

This is the book readers should give to any poor soul considering a degree in mainstream economics. Hopefully it will discourage them. It’s easy to read. Rodrik is a much better writer than most economists. And it’s not too long, about 200 pages.