Spare a thought for the economists

House prices crashed, investment banks bombed, auto manufacturers tanked. Governments have been lambasted, corporate honchos have been exposed and the public have been blamed for spending too much. But what of the economists?

If the world was one large company, the first persons who would be sacked are the economists. Aren't they responsible for predicting these crises? Isn't it their job to warn the rest of the world about impending doom? Just as intellegence officers need to cop the blame for a lapse in security, shouldn't leading economists be pulled up for this mess?

The Economics department in the University of Chicago has parking lots designated 'NL' (Nobel Laureate). Some of my friends who study there estimate that every third room belongs to a Nobel prize winner. What were these guys thinking a few years back? Couldn't even one of them see the whole crisis coming?

Reading Drake Bennett's piece in Boston.com gave me a few answers. And the problem really may not be as much with the economists as with the field itself. The title of the piece - Paradigm Lost - sums it up.

Economists are asking aloud whether the field has grown too specialized, too abstract - and too divorced, in some sense, from the way real-world economies actually function. They argue that many of the models used to explain and predict the dynamics of financial markets or national economies have been scrubbed clean, in the interest of theoretical elegance, of the inevitable erraticism of human behavior. As a result, the analytical tools of the trade offer little help in a crisis, and have little to say about the sort of collapses that led to this one.

A few quotes and a couple of shoes

The editor of the Yale Book of Quotations has complied the Top Ten quotes of 2008. I liked most of them but No.7 made me choke a bit more than the rest.

"Maybe 100." - John McCain on how many years U.S. troops could remain in Iraq.

McCain and Sarah Palin dominate the list but what was particularly interesting was that there was no quote from Geroge W Bush. Now then ... that's a clear sign of how much he's been overshadowed of late.

But he's not completely disappeared - will he ever? - and a shoe-hurling Iraqi journalist brought him right back into the spotlight. In the LA Times Rosa Brooks is relieved that it was only a pair of shoes and not grenades.

By willingly risking prison and death just to throw those shoes, he reminded the powerful and powerless alike that a single symbolic gesture can be more effective than a thousand grenades.

I've always been fascinated by this footwear-throwing business. In our part of the world, few insults come worse than a threat to being hit by a chappal. "Yeddu Seruppai" is a Tamil phrase that can roughly be translated as: 'piss me off more and I'll slam you with my chappals'. Why pick up a flimsy, rubbery, harmless bit of footwear to threaten someone? Even a leather shoe can cause only so much damage.

I'm pretty sure it's got to do with the moral insult of using a weapon that's been stained with dirt and muck. And which accentuates Brooks' point more: might as well inflict moral damage rather than a physical one.