Dirk Ehnts — The Good Economist

AEN: I take it that you don’t hold much confidence or faith in attempts at economic prediction through econometric techniques.

SHACKLE: No, frankly I don’t. I shall be shot out of the profession even further than I have been already; this will be the end of my career, if it hasn’t ended many years ago. However, I will be honest and say that I don’t think that economics can yield constants of the kind that physics does. Physicists have constants, e.g., the acceleration due to gravity, the table of atomic weights. I don’t believe that economics can have constants like that, You might make measurements which are all right for today. But, there are countless people whose interest it is to make nonsense of those measurements tomorrow. Well, now I have really been quite honest.

AEN: If one takes that position, then a question could be asked of you: Given what you have said, what should economists do? 

SHACKLE: I think they should give up giving advice, except on the most hesitant, the most broad grounds. I think they should introduce an ethical element, a more than ethical element. If a man is asked whether public expenditure should be cut or not, he perhaps should say, “Well, if we cut it, we shall cause a great deal of misery; if we don’t cut it, we don’t know what the consequences will be, but we can’t at least have this misery on our consciences”. This sort of argument is not an economic argument, it’s an argument with one’s conscience.

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The Good Economist
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School of Economics and Law