Has anyone read John Cassidy's piece in the 12/2/96 New Yorker. "The Decline of Economics"? It's a bunch of fluff, but there are some choice quotes: "Is economics making enough progress to justify the millions of dollars a year that the taxpayer spends to subsidize economic research? the answer is no... Economists are like dairy farmers. We think we deserve every penny we get... We need more well-trained high-school teachers of economics, not more Ph.D economists." -- Greg Mankiw "I write down a bunch of equations, and I say this equation has to do with people's preferences and the equation is a description of the technology. But this doesn't make it so. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. That has to be a matter of evidence. ...Monetary shocks just aren't that important. That's the view I've been driven to. There's no question, that's a retreat in my views." -- Robert Lucas "Because of [Robert] Lucas and others, for two decades no graduate students were trained who were capable of competing with us by building econometric models that had a hope of explaining short-run output and price dynamics. We educated a lot of macroeconomists who were trained to do only two things - teach macroeconomics to graduate students and publish in the journals." -- Laurence Meyer Even on Wall Street, which has traditionally provided a rewarding outlet for economists, there has been a reaction against the subject. Morgan Stanley, for example will not hire economics Ph.D's unless they also have substantial experience outside academe. "We insist on at least a three-to-four-year cleansing experience to neutralize the brainwashing that takes place in these graduate programs." -- Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley Economist
