Sunday, September 16, 2012

Bill Mitchell | The brightest minds can be so dumb in particular circumstances


Bill Mitchell rips the economics profession a new one — again. And explains how and why the US "predicament" as a fantasy.

Bill Mitchell — billy blog
The brightest minds can be so dumb in particular circumstances
Bill Mitchell | Professor of Economics, Research Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the University of Newcastle

7 comments:

paul meli said...

Methinks Bill reads MNE occasionally…

Jonf said...

Erskine Bowles. Isn't he said to be the next Treasury Sec.? Bill does the man a favot by his title calling hin "bright". He's just dumb as a bag of rocks. Too bad for us.

Tom Hickey said...

Said Bowles [of Paul Ryan]: “I think he’s smart. I think he’s intellectually curious. I think he is honest, straightforward and sincere. And I think he does have a serious budget out there — it doesn’t mean I agree with it by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m not going to act like I don’t like him or that I don’t have some real respect for him." Along with his praise of Ryan he also had criticism of the current government. Said Bowles: “The people of this country get it. They know that the fiscal path this country is on is not sustainable and that these deficits of over a trillion dollars a year are a cancer that in time will destroy our Country from within..."
Wikipedia/Erskine Bowles

The man is dangerous.

David said...

Bowles seems to be one of those slimy "bi-partisan" fixers that they trot out when they need to whitewash some issue or another. Kind of in the same mold as, say, a Lee Hamilton or a David Gergen.

Ralph Musgrave said...

Or as Krugman put it earlier this year, “Again and again one sees people with seemingly sterling credentials — Federal Reserve presidents, economists with Ph.D.s from good schools — propounding views that I thought were obvious fallacies, at least to anyone who had studied the subject a bit. And the hits just keep coming.”

Part of the explanation is that many if not most academics don’t give a toss about solving the world’s problems: their main objective is to spew out words, get articles published etc, because that furthers their careers.

Anonymous said...

Ralph, what you said about most economists, applies doubly so to Mike Norman, he used to come on fox and literally laugh in peter schiff's face about the housing collapse. I have never heard him issue a public apology to Peter Schiff or all the other people he used to ridicule and laugh at (when mike was wrong). Mike Norman is an attention hawg of the worst kind. If you wanted to pick the WORST advocate you could possibly think of to do the most damage to your cause, Mike Norman has to be in the top 5 on the whole planet.

Tom Hickey said...

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
— Michael Jordan, at BrainyQuotes

It's the ratio of hits to misses, not any individual shot.