In his endlessly excellent 1981 book The Economy In Mind, the late, great Warren Brookes told the story of an economist clearing customs at JFK Airport in the malaise-ridden, late 1970s. The official who took the economist’s passport asked him his profession, and upon receiving a reply questioned allowing him back into the country given the immense damage economists had done over the decades in the U.S., and around the world.
Brookes’s book, one of the all-time greats on economic policy, came to mind while reading Matthew Hennessey’s very enjoyable and very real (in so many way’s he’s telling his own story) new addition to the economics discussion: Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market. While the Wall Street Journal’s deputy op-ed editor has written a book about economics, he’s clear in the opening sentence that “I’m not an economist.” Amen to that! If there’s a critique of Hennessey’s opener it would be that it was perhaps too sheepish. The view here is that he mistakenly left out “proudly” after word one of his book.
Really, who would brag about having spent years and enormous sums of money in pursuit of a doctoral understanding of human action, and more realistically, common sense? Hennessey seemingly acknowledges his lack of an economics credential as a way of placating the self-serious “gatekeepers of the vast edifice of economic knowledge” who “tend not to look kindly on the opinions of the uncredentialed,” but the joke’s on the credentialed who laughably claim an ability to “model” human action with charts, graphs, and equations. The view here is that in time, the obnoxious and unreliable conceit that is GDP will be a laugh line.
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