AGONY OF AN ECONOMIST...

Recently i was reading an article titled "What good are economists, anyway?" by Peter Coy,BusinessWeek and was left with a feeling of ennui by the time i finished reading the long and pointed charade on the state of global economy and the contribution of the economist to the effect.

Critics are always scathing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, said: "We have to build a society that doesn't depend on forecasts by idiotic economists." Says Paul Wilmott, a quantitative finance expert: "Economists' models are just awful. They completely forget how important the human element is."

A commenter on a housing blog wrote recently that economists did a worse job of forecasting the housing market than either his father, who has no formal education, or his mother, who got up to second grade."If you are an economist and did not see this coming, you should seriously reconsider the value of your education and maybe do something with a tangible value to society, like picking vegetables," he wrote on patrick.net.

These were just some of the better criticisms of a job done badly but sample this to get a feel of the agony which is doing the rounds:"Take that, you pointy-headed failures(Read ECONOMISTS)! Go jump off a supply curve!"

To be fair, economists can't be expected to predict the future with any kind of exactitude. The randomness of the event makes it such an outlier that any amount of autopsy of the dead wont reveal the absolute truth. Because we are trained to think of financial markets as efficient, and made to believe in the Hypothesis that at any given time, security prices fully reflect all available information the implications of what follows when the opposite happens turns out to be really profound.That most economists weren't primed to spot the dangers posed by lax mortgage lending, over leveraged financial institutions, and impenetrably complex derivatives just goes on to prove "What you know...Cannot really hurt you".The problem lies in what u dont!!!

The paradox of efficient markets is that if every investor believed a market was efficient, then the market would not be efficient because no one would analyze securities. In effect, efficient markets depend on market participants who believe the market is inefficient and trade securities in an attempt to outperform the market.I believe the danger lies more in leaving the job up to "THE EXPERT" just because he knows best.In reality may be nobody knows best.There is a very old Stock market adage "Those who know don't tell, and those who tell don't know". Just because somebody says he may not necessarily know ...

Leaving It to the Experts isn't always a mutually beneficial proposition for both the expert and us. It's always a convenient way of shrugging off our own role in the circuitry. And it creates a huge professional market for all kinds of "expertise." There's a whole ugly universe waiting to be explored there which only feeds itself stronger if other like us allow them to. I feel we need to question the EMPTY SUITS and hold them responsible at every step for the meandering they so inexplicably do.

A word of caution is warranted for all the Empty suits we see around us.Such a person is little more than a suit of clothes. He is an empty soul in those fine suits smiling and perhaps scheming at every turn to make a fast buck.A suit, especially an empty suit, is in sharp contrast to a techie...An issue i will hold up for later, but in the end i would conclude with a voice of reason...
and this is the voice we need to listen.

"You cannot reason a man out of something that he did not reason his way into." -- Jonathan Swift