BusinessWeekのカバーストーリーは"Hey, Economics Geniuses! What Happened?" 例によって「経済学は役に立たない」という話だが、ピックアップすると
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the scholar of rare events who wrote Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, says: "We have to build a society that doesn't depend on forecasts by idiotic economists."

  • John H. Cochrane of the University of Chicago dismisses those who advocate Keynesian stimulus, saying: "Professional economists, the guys I hang out with, are not reverting to ancient Keynesianism any more than physicists are going back to Aristotle when they can't understand how fast the universe is expanding."

  • Michael Woodford, who argue that macroeconomists are converging on a methodology for asking questions. But even Woodford agrees that "recent debates don't particularly make the field look unified."

  • Thomas Sargent was one of the thinkers behind "rational expectations," which says that ordinary people can correctly anticipate the range and likelihood of possible future outcomes. Sargent now says that theory was an oversimplification. In real life, he explains, households and businesses are highly uncertain.
この記事によれば、オバマ政権の財政政策を支持しているのはKrugman, Roubini, Shillerの3人だけで、あとの経済学者はすべて反対だ。これは政治家が経済学を理解していないのか、経済学者が非常識なのか・・・