[![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSE1hLCKDoGrdPmLPRes2dhu87VBVoyaM3arMwZnJDiu8/image.png)](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/against-economics)

> "There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose."

And there's the first error, the assumption that there is anyone who can manage large economies. He's right that economics is not fit for that purpose - the curious task of economics is to explain to you why nobody and no discipline is fit for that purpose.

But by god we *want* it to be possible, so it *must* be possible, and if economics was just done the way we non-economists really wish it was done, then it *would* be possible.

Time for another installment in my occasional series critiquing academics who drive out of their lane without doing their homework.

Not only does this boom review go on for about 1800 words before mentioning the book it's allegedly reviewing, but those pixels are devoted to this anthropologist explaining why economists are wrong about economics, and in so doing he fails to demonstrate that he has given even unserious study of the field. By this guy's own standard any economist whose sole exposure to anthropology is facing read a Margaret Mead book as an undergrad is fully qualified to tell anthropologists how they're doing it all wrong.

It's easy to see how complicated one's own field is, because one has spent a lot of time studying it. And it's then easy to underestimate how difficult another field is precisely because you haven't studied it. But any well educated person ought to have an awareness that there are surely going to be depths in that other field he doesn't know about, and walk with trepidation.

This is the effect of ideology, though. Even the well educated are intellectually perverted by it. We know something must be true, because that's how we want the world to work.

Academia's full of fools.