Wednesday, January 13, 2010

ignoble award in economics

Real World Economics Review blog is running a competition for the ignoble award in economics:
With other learned professions entrusted with public confidence, such as medicine and engineering, it is inconceivable that their professional bodies would not at the very least censure members who had successfully persuaded governments and public opinion to ignore elementary safety measures, so causing epidemics and widespread building collapses.

To date, however, the world’s major economics associations have declined to censure the major facilitators of the GFC or even to publicly identify them. This silence, this indifference to causing human suffering, constitutes grave moral failure. It also gives license to economists to continue to indulge in axiom-happy behaviour. Nor has the economics establishment offered recognition to those economists who were not taken in by fads and fashion and whose competence, if listened to, would have prevented the collapse …
The nomination, evidence and final winners procedures are explained at the site.

Click here to see recent nominations with some comments / reasons. So far, nominations include Greenspan, Bernanke, Summers, Prescott, Fama, Stigler, Friedman, Scholes, Geithner, Sachs, Krugman, Samuelson, Stiglitz and Gordon Brown / Ed Balls

Real World Economics Review is a communal blog for alternative economists. See their About page for more detail, including pdf downloads of papers to recent journals.

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