Is economic science a farce? Foreword to Steve Keen´'s Economics Unmasked

Abstract

The book for which this foreword was written is a claim, that of an academic economist who questions his community and, more than it, the whole of society. The questions he asks us are the ones we all ask ourselves: Why is it that so few economists have been able to anticipate, even confusedly, a catastrophe as important as the financial crisis of 2008? What has changed in your conception of the world as a result of the crisis? Some of us economists will gladly answer: the subprime crisis was an “absolute surprise”, a “black swan”, a “distribution tail” event. Of course, we may have lacked vigilance, nostra culpa, but in the end, it was impossible to anticipate the unusual. And that is precisely why we have changed almost nothing to our economic models. Apart from a few minutiae here and there, what use would it be to profoundly modify theoretical representations about which we have every reason to think that they are the least bad possible? Absolutio.