Because he should be. See what our shiny technocratic elites hath wrought:
Whether it is straight journalism, or columnists’ rants, or even imaginative responses like the play Enron, the problem is described either as a technical system that went wrong or as a set of strange inventions that were then corruptly used by bad and greedy people. And in doing this all the journalists, and the critics, and the playwrights earnestly try and explain to us the system in the terms, and the framework of “market-speak” created by the economists and the financiers.
The high point of this came last week when lead items on TV news were devoted to the letters written by two opposing groups of economists. It was the height of absurdity as economists from the opposing camps came on News-24 to announce pompously that “this is far more important than politics”. As David Blanchflower (ex-member of the Monetary Policy Committee) pointed out in a really good piece in the New Statesman – HERE – they have absolutely no basis for any of their claims. The reason is that they have no idea what is going to happen to the economy in the next 12 months.
But more than that – perhaps the economists are the problem? That they themselves cannot see the full dimensions of the project of which they have been a part.
But still we listen to them, and still our journalists use their language and assumptions.
Which means that despite the disasters we are still trapped in the economists’ world.
But the moment you pull back and look at that world from a wider perspective strange things start to emerge.
Having spent the last two months reading more than a few delightful essays about the cult of the expert and failings of technical management, this is of course relevant to my interests. And yours too, most likely, if you are reading it here.
Alamut 