I remember 10 years ago when I asked econ profs what they thought about behavioural effects and how I was mostly knocked down (because this was back then not according to doctrine). That's when I began to realize the importance of politics and the status quo in the academic profession. Lesson learned!
10 years later - it's all behavioural and empirical econ (think "Freakonomics") that gets mentioned. Now the field is on its way to change (also due to a recent financial meltdown, and the inability to forecast any of it). Quote from article:
"A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions."
Also think of the fairly recent Nobel prize (Kahneman 2002) in behavioural econ. As a side note, Kahneman, a psychologist, claims to never have taken a single econ course.
I read this in print so i'm going to assume this is the same. I think it's a very sensasionalist, bandwagon-hopping headline, and the majority of economic principles are just as sound now as they were before. The problem lies in their application; too often economic models are being over-simplified for people who are not familiar with their workings, and people without this understanding are making important decisions based on them. The other obvious fundamental problem with economics is that you will never be able to account for everything, and there are some things you won't realise you've missed till you can observe their effects. This isn't economics going wrong, that is how economics progresses. There are plenty of things that can be learnt from recent events, but it's naive to suggest that most post-Keynesian research is suddenly worthless, as was suggested in other articles in that issue.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] thread10 years later - it's all behavioural and empirical econ (think "Freakonomics") that gets mentioned. Now the field is on its way to change (also due to a recent financial meltdown, and the inability to forecast any of it). Quote from article:
"A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions."
Also think of the fairly recent Nobel prize (Kahneman 2002) in behavioural econ. As a side note, Kahneman, a psychologist, claims to never have taken a single econ course.