Lawyers are used to being good sports (or at least trying) when they hear for the zillionth time a second for the Shakespearean suggestion: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
Now it's someone else's turn -- the economists. As a Times Online headline says:
"Economists are the forgotten guilty men: Academics - and their mad theories - are to blame for the financial crisis. They too deserve to be hauled into the dock."
Infectious Greed alludes directly to Shakespeare in "First, We Kill All the Economists":
My frustration isn't so much the schoolyard silliness, but the
demonstrated inability of prominent economists to talk to one another
in the same language with words meaning the same thing and not
freighted with a metric ton (or ten) of political baggage. . . . If nothing else, however, one benefit of the current depression is that
whatever meager value macroeconomics was thought to have as a
prescriptive discipline is thoroughly shot.
IG links on to "On the Failure of Macroeconomists" at the NYT:
For the past month or so, I’ve made it a habit to ask fellow economists
how the response to the financial crisis has been improved by the past
few decades of macroeconomic theorizing. Dozens of conversations later,
I don’t have much to report.
It is a worthy debate, since the economists do indeed have much to answer for.
Besides, we lawyers need a rest. Yeah - go get'em. They went thataway!
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