What is -William Easterly attempting to establish with -William Easterly's claim?
He is attempting to establish that William Easterly and other mainstream academic economists do not suck at their jobs and that modern macroeconomics has not been thoroughly discredited by the recent (ongoing) financial crisis. He attempts to do this by claiming that their failure to predict anything correctly is not an indictment of their intellectually bankrupt field but rather a ringing endorsement. In so doing he conveniently ignores those economists and investors who correctly predicted the crisis and explained in detail what was going to happen and why it was going to happen in the years before the crisis.
In so doing he conveniently ignores those economists and investors who correctly predicted the crisis and explained in detail what was going to happen and why it was going to happen in the years before the crisis.
There's always someone predicting a financial crisis, and when it inevitably happens (and one will eventually come), someone probably predicted it. Was there anyone who predicted the crisis based on reliable methods that we could use to predict another crisis?
Easterly does have a point though - there are two ways to predict a crisis. Infer th...
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