http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080517.BKMIND17/TPStory/Entertainment
The above link will take you to a review of a book by economist Michael Shermer. There’s a noteworthy observation buried in the review:
“So many economics schools have fallen flat, so many economic predictions have proved wrong, so many economic policy prescriptions have produced disastrous consequences, that these days economics is a discipline under siege. So demoralized are economists themselves that nearly two-thirds, according to an American Economic Association survey, have decided that their profession is completely ‘over-mathematicized and unrelated to the real world.'”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Shermer’s book suggests that economists would be better-served by turning their focus from shoe-horning economics into 19th century laws of physics to paying more attention to brain chemistry.
Sheesh. Behavioral psychology and brain chemistry. What next? These economists are unbelievable. If they’d just get over their irrational fear of the subject of population growth and consider the ramifications, they might have an epiphany of what has been eluding them for two centuries. If they’d just stop to consider what happens to per capita consumption as population density rises beyond an optimum level, as I’ve explained in Five Short Blasts, everything from globalization to personal finance would begin to make sense to them.
