Economists - What the Crisis Teaches

A time for humility

November 27, 2008

by FT

This is the text of a speech given by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, at the FT’s annual economists’ drinks party in London last night.

Last year I enjoyed telling a number of entirely unfair jokes about economists. This year, I looked at the same source and found only one joke about the profession’s involvement in depressions. Here it is:

“Such a severe depression and banking crisis could not have been achieved by normal civil servants and politicians, it required economists’ involvement.”

This, in short, is a time for humility. Why did we mostly get “it” so sensationally wrong? How did something that looks increasingly like the precursor of a slump creep up on almost all of us this year? It is a pretty good question. It is a pretty embarrassing one, too. It is one everybody I meet now asks. Even Her Majesty has asked why we didn’t do a better job of forecasting this mess.

Perhaps this was more than could reasonably be expected. But I do think we need to ask ourselves whether we could have done a better job of understanding the processes at work.

The difficulty was that we all tend to look at just one bit of the clichéd elephant in the room. Monetary economists looked at monetary policy. Financial economists looked at risk management. International macroeconomists looked at global imbalances. Central bankers focused on inflation. Regulators looked at Basel capital ratios and even then only inside the banking system. Politicians enjoyed the good times and did not ask too many questions. And what of commentators? Well, they tended to indulge in the fantasy that the above knew what they were talking about. I am embarrassed to admit this.

I am not seeking to deny that a few people saw important pieces of the emerging puzzle and some saw more than a few pieces. In my gallery of heroes are Avinash Persaud, who told us early and often that the risk-management models on which regulators foolishly relied were absurd individually and lethal collectively, a point also made by John Eatwell; Kenneth Rogoff, who warned of the US external deficit; Wynne Godley, who warned no less powerfully of the domestic financial imbalances associated with those external imbalances; Charles Dumas and Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research, who warned of the global imbalances; Roger Bootle of Capital Economics, who pointed out the fantasy of believing that we could become rich by selling second-hand houses to one another at ever more exorbitant prices; Raghuram Rajan of Chicago Business School, who identified the frailty of the new financial capitalism; Bernard Connolly of AIG, who warned of the ongoing “Ponzi game” and George Magnus of UBS, who foretold the consequent “Minsky moment”; Stephen King of HSBC, who argued that US growth was built on sand; Andrew Smithers of Smithers and Co and Martin Weale of the National Institute, who told us that UK fiscal policy was far too loose; Bill White of the Bank for International Settlements who insisted again and again that monetary policy should not ignore asset prices and associated credit explosions; and Nouriel Roubini, of course, who was Dr Doom before almost anybody else.

The list is not exhaustive and I apologise to all those offended by my omissions. But I would insist that one of the big lessons of this experience is that economics is too compartmentalised and so, too, are official institutions. To get a full sense of the risks being run, we needed to combine the worst scenarios of each sets of experts. Only then would we have had some sense of how the global imbalances, inflation targeting, the impact of China, asset price bubbles, financial innovation, deregulation and risk management systems might interact.

Alternatively, we could have spent more time studying the work of Hyman Minsky. We could also have considered the possibility that, just as Keynes’s ideas were tested to destruction in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Milton Friedman’s ideas might suffer a similar fate in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. All gods fail, if one believes too much. Keynes said, of course, that “practical men … are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. So, of course, are economists, even if the defunct economists are sometimes still alive.

These might seem idle thoughts: these errors are now bygones. But what if we are now making new and even bigger errors in rushing back to Keynes? The thought worries me. What if now that households in the US and UK are no longer able, or willing, to borrow any more, we are set on breaking the back of taxpayers, instead? Is the end of this crisis the destruction of the credit of some of the world’s most creditworthy governments? It is a thought I would like to suppress. But it haunts me. It should haunt you, too.

These, then, are disturbing times for economists. But they are not all bad. They are also times of the highest intellectual excitement. Economists have been given the material for research programmes stretching decades into the future! Tens of thousands of PhDs, not to mention a few Nobel prizes, are surely waiting to be hatched! And if this crisis kills Real Business Cycle theory, as it surely should, it cannot be all bad.

Yet I can’t get away from this feeling of inadequacy. One might not expect much from economists, but one would surely expect them to warn us of a crisis on this scale. Some humility is in order. That is going to hurt. A humble economist? Surely not.

原文：http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/11/a-time-for-humility/#more-272