Yoda's advice: Good for Luke, Bad for America

Yoda, in one of his famous Zen-like koans, advises Luke "You must unlearn what you have learned."

This may be good advice to an aspiring Jedi or Tibetan Monk but it isn't such great advice for America's economists and economic policy decision makers.

Paul Krugman bemoans in this post that the field of economics has seemingly lost many of its hard-won insights of the past eighty years.

I’ve been arguing for a while that much of the economics profession has lost its way, recapitulating old errors because it made a point of unlearning what Keynes taught. But it’s not just economists who willfully threw away hard-won insights.

While Krugman  outlines a series of theories as to why this is so, I don't think he has embraced the one I find most interesting.  The documentary of the 2008 economic collapse "Inside Job" directed by Charles Ferguson exposes the corrupt link between Wall Street and our nation's leading business and economics departments.  Here Ferguson confronts Columbia University Business School Dean and former George W. Bush economic adviser Glenn Hubbard about potential conflicts of interest between his teaching and the exorbitant consulting fees he is paid by Wall Street banks and corporations.






It is so rare to see people like this called to account; one must simply relish the look on this guy's face when he is confronted with his shameless shilling for corporate robber barons.  These are the people, or in this case one of the servants of these people, who have led us in to the abyss.

We must not only remember what Keynes taught us eighty years ago, but also not forget eighty years from now what led us astray in 2008.  For surely once the economy recovers and we begin to rebuild from the ashes of this crisis there will be a new generation of "Glenn Hubbards" ready to lead us in to the inferno while they happily line their pockets at our expense.