The Republican Party (not always, but lately) has been extraordinarily good at holding onto thoroughly wrong-headed and often dangerous game-plans despite all of history's lessons.
I like the way Paul Krugman captures this syndrome in a phrase, "learned helplessness," as it applies to a particular group of economists who just plain refuse to learn from past experience. Naw -- they wander around tripping over their own feet and declaring that "more research is needed."
Man, sometimes the truth is in front of people and they just turn their head away. They remind me of my dog who, when I point to the big ol' jackrabbit under the tree over here, looks fixedly over there -- in precisely the opposite direction.
Here's what Krugman says about th0se dumb-dog economists.
[Some] economists declare that the business cycle is deeply puzzling, and that we need much more research before we can make policy recommendations. In short, what we’re looking at is learned helplessness.
Economists who didn’t go down this path, who didn’t flush everything the profession had learned between 1936 and 1973 down the memory hole, aren’t especially baffled by the situation we’re in now; on the contrary, it looks like an extreme version of a fairly familiar event, and policy recommendations aren’t hard to make.
It’s only if you’re committed to a failed research project — a project that failed a generation ago, but refused to admit it — that you’re baffled.
Comments