Nutzlose Ökonomen

Für einmal muss ich kein einziges bashendes Wort verwenden – Bill macht gleich alles selber und trifft den Nagel auf den Kopf:

An economist, of the modern variety, is a statistician…an extrapolator…and a mountebank. If numbers go up two months in a row, he predicts they will go up another one. He rarely stops to ask whether his numbers really make any sense.

Instead, he merely adds them up and rolls them out. Thus – at the bubbly top in 2006 – he was he able to describe the likelihood of default on a certain derivative instrument as a „Six Sigma event“ without laughing. A Six Sigma event happens once every 2,500,000 days. Then again, when the Bubble of 2002-2007 popped, they happened once a week. The blogs are full of chatter on the subject. What good is the economics profession, asks Paul Samuelson, if it cannot foresee the biggest single economic event in at least a quarter-century?

Quelle: Robert McNamara Described as the „Architect“ of Vietnam War