I still managed to get an A, but it was a lot more of a close thing than it should have been.

The times in which change occurs most rapidly are when an institution feels threatened from the outside.

Folks hate being knock upside the head from something they don’t see coming and you can bet they are looking for some visibility now. How much macro visibility are folks like Athreya providing us these days?

At least much of the blogosphere has been able to work out a pretty good story for what the heck just happened. And better still, it is lit up with possibilities for what might happen next. To listen to those whose living is at the intersection of economics and government, you would think that a gigantic 10,000 year financial asteriod came in from outer space and soon this will all be just a bad memory.

Those among us who pay attention to history notice that foul economic weather is actually pretty common and we aren’t interested in being stuck in a blizzard in our bermuda shorts like last time.

The consequences of enshrouding economics in arcane incomprehensibility are all around us, yet more agonizing than any World Cup defeat. In the aftermath of drastic failure, whether systemic or criminally contrived, trite mythological substitutes for history from which no human being is likely to learn, nor care to, are pseudo-academic, mathematically futile and no fun at the pub, either.

But as someone who has had to make some hard decisions, I have come to realize that while I can allow highly trained professionals to give me advice or even make my decisions for me, the consequences of those actions will always remain with me alone.

While macroeconomics may be a technocrat’s dream (the complexity of formualae!), it is ultimately the layman’s problem. I think the econobloggers understand that point much better than the academics do.

However, unless I’m missing something, all you seem to be saying is that some people are good at detail, while others are good at the big picture. Hardly a revelation.

Perhaps Econ 101 should spend some time studying stock cow herds, asking why the herd gathers in a corner when a storm is coming, or why they will move single file behind a leader for some reason. With humans, the key is creating panic and fear. You don’t need to actually have a shortage of fuel at the pumps to create gas lines, you just have to create a perception of shortage. So when Goldman and Morgan Stanley created the perception of an oil shortage in 2008, prices skyrocketed, even though there had been no genuine disruption to the market.

So when Dr Ahtreya and his economist cohorts admit they are closer to the humanities than to hard science, I might start trusting them. Until that time, I will look at their writings with the same skepticism I use on bloggers. Not saying I discount the writings of either group, but I do look for supporting facts, etc.

Dr. Athreya says “Most of us readily accept the proposition that [o]ncology requires training, and rarely give time over to non-medical-professionals’ musings. Do we expect advances in cell-biology to be immediately accessible to anyone with even a college degree?” Well, yes, we do. Of course there are blogs that provide non-experts with access to scientific knowledge and recent research about in less technical terms, even in oncology. Consider
scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org,
which recently discussed the roles of telomeres, tumor necrosis factor, and statin drugs in causing or fighting various forms of cancer. There are many, many other blogs, such as Realclimate and Pharyngula (another excellent Science blog), that bridge the gap between science and opinion in a manner that traditional journalism cannot. This kind of blogging fills in a yawning gap in our information space, and has already grown to be surprisingly important and influential in Western society and polity. In short, I think Dr. Athreya is laboring under serious misapprehensions about the role blogs can play, and I think in a few decades his essay will read like an angry polemic by a Medieval Scholastic railing against vulgar translations of the Bible.