The Delusional Discipline

I know The Boy has already linked to this in his Sunday Blogroll, but I want to reinforce what Atrios said about Brad DeLong's typically self-impressed, self-deluded screed on the wisdom of technocrats like himself in the "moderate" world. DeLong has value occasionally when taking apart the delusions of others, but he is a model of what I regularly rant about in these spaces concerning economists who have drunk so much Kool-Aid that their minds have been addled. There are many good things that economics can teach, because it does have a decent view of about 12% of the world. Its problem as a discipline is that its priests and acolytes (and that's what they are) not only don't understand that they're missing the other 88% but that they think the whole world is the 12%. Like I've said before, they've illuminated pretty well one room of a large house and proceed to describe the entire place plus the grounds outside. This isn't as true now as a decade or so ago, with the realization of a few of them that complexity theory screws up their models and that behavioral economics might possess some insights, but it's not enough to say I'm creating a straw man when that straw man is still the bulk of what is taught in most classes and still drives our domestic and foreign policies. Even the ones like DeLong who want much of what I think would be good for the world can't free themselves from the religious pull of their theocratic learning in order to get there. Turning the world over to them, as Atrios says, has not proven effective, yet they continue to delude themselves and blame the world for not acting the way their models say it should. Good God. Only lunatics would turn their decisions over to people like that.

So what does that say about us?