Politics and Press

What do economists do, anyway?

Okay so the economy of the world is going to Disneyland because the economists advising the US government on how to regulate the flow of money apparently don’t know their ass from their elbow. Or are they simply in cahoots with the CEOS who got millions of dollars for having bankrupted their firms on their watch? Or could it just be total incompetence, or the display of the emperor’s new economic expertise clothes? Should they be forced to read Hans Christian Andersen stories, instead of economic comic books? After all George Bush has an MBA from Harvard, the same super-elite US university that Canadians, who have regulated their banking system so this can’t happen, call America’s McGill. And he certainly doesn’t know anything about the topic. Why drag down McGill’s reputation? My real question is therefore: What the hell do economists do if they know buggerall about economics? Couldn’t we save a lot of it by just getting rid of this profession?