The “professors” are academic economists. Like “ostriches and penguins”
the professors are “slightly ridiculous.” They write papers that are
densely packed with indecipherable mathematics and jargon, and “most of
these papers are not worth reading.” In fact they are written not to be
widely read but merely to impress the author’s colleagues with his
cleverness. The ideas advanced in these papers are not original or
definitive explanations of how the economy actually works, but rather
“ingenious elaboration without fundamental innovation” — “old wine in
new bottles, usually with fancier mathematical labels.” All of this
Krugman freely concedes. Ah, but if one would only back up far
enough and view the proceedings from a distance, he would see that
the professors are engaged in an “enterprise that steadily adds to our
knowledge.” The truth is that economics is a “primitive science,” akin
to medical science at the end of the nineteenth century, when physicians
knew basically how the body worked and not much more. True these
primitive medical scientists were able to advise how to prevent some
diseases and what quack procedures and medicines to avoid, but they
could not cure very many diseases. So it is with economics professors
today who know a lot about how the economy works. They can even
definitively advise how to prevent hyperinflation and in most cases how
to avoid depressions. But there is much that remains a mystery to these
primitive practitioners of the dismal science. In particular, “they
don’t know how to make a poor country rich or bring back the magic of
economic growth when it seems to have gone away.”
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