"Economists in Glass Houses . . . "

SuperFreakonomics: due Oct. 20

“A Realtor and a pimp perform the same primary service.”

--SuperFreakonomics (2009)

Egged on by their success skewering Realtors in their best-selling 2005 book, "Freakonomics," its authors have an encore due out next week.

Judging by the above quote from the book, they plan to pick up where they left off.

I'll have a more-considered rebuttal soon.

For now, suffice to say that economists in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones -- at Realtors, or anyone else.

Not only didn't economists as a group anticipate today's economic ills, their constructs actually laid the groundwork for them -- by assuming that people are always rational, reward-maximizing actors.

Oh, yeah: and free markets are efficient; business (and Wall Street) can be trusted to regulate itself; and a laundry list of other misguided beliefs and practices that are collectively as enlightened as medieval physicians' bloodletting was in their day.

Lagging Indicators

As I've posted before, not only can't economists accurately forecast the future, they can't even accurately describe the present: witness the almost one year lag declaring the current recession.

Is the recession now over? Economists will tell us . . . sometime in 2010.

Enough for now.

In the meantime, please feel free to check out my previous posts on the subject, "Freakonomics Rebuttal" (one of the most popular posts ever on this blog!).