Of course, this is the destruction and/or falls of other people. One of the significant things about being a tenured economics professor is that one is insulated from a sh*tload of the economic turmoil of the past few decades, and the next.

Unless major state university systems started to off-shoring their economics departments, of course. That could cause a lot of turmoil.

Or are you just saying that the first group is prideful and haughty?

You must have had a strong religous background and attended much Vacation Bible School.

Why would anyone consider Wikipedia a source? On the better articles it will summarise and point to them though. A better question would be how many of those historians have had quotes from their works contributed to Wikipedia (and many of them probably wouldn’t know if they have).

So I find it hard to conclude that “first-best” economists are not some combination of stupid, incompetent, and dishonest. I appreciate that I am labelling some winners of the “Nobel” prize and other prominent economists.

Insofar as “second-best” economists pretend that “first-best” economists would have a point if only some such inperfection did not arise, they don’t impress me. Here I’m more torn.

It seems odd to me that a Harvard economist writing about “Why economists disagree” doesn’t note that his profession seems to sanction recognized thieves as economists in good standing. I understand that academics are under social pressure not to point out that some of their colleagues are simply dishonest.

Interesting that Rodrik links to a Wikipedia entry. I asked a room of diplomatic historians at a panel on historians’ communication with the public how many of them contributed to Wikipedia—not one raised their hand, and a only a few considered Wikipedia a legitimate source.

If you ask me, this looks remarkably like the Genesis 1:1—1:31. The same line of argument as with creationism: we don’t know, therefore we know.