In conversation with

Exordium

The Strangeness of the Discipline

A Good Scientific Conversation

Why Then Economics?

Tireless young economists trying to get into the profession write papers that will not be published or, if published, not read, spend money traveling to conferences where they will not be heard, and sacrifice home and family to do it all. Go to a large conference like the meetings of the American Economic Association (held just after New Year's with 6000 economists attending) and experience it for yourself. You find numerous sessions on the program and will find out that most of them take place in small rooms with only a few members in the attendance. If you are lucky, your paper got on the program, and you need to be more than lucky to get some sensible comments from the discussant or the audience. More likely, you find yourself anonymous in the crowd attending some of the larger sessions where the famous economists hold forth. Some may ask why, why be an economist when the returns are so hard to detect. Indeed, I'm spending my time writing this book when, as we've discussed, the readership of a book on economics is more about hope than expectation. Whatever could be my motivation?

Perhaps it has everything to do with hope. If the unpopularity, the oddities of language, the dubious science, the dissimilarity of thought, the emotionalism, the gossip, the lack of reflection all make for the strangeness of the discipline of economics, they also compell me to hope to make sense of it. The contradictions encourage me to advance a framework that exonerates economics its strangeness. To show, in fact, that it's not strange at all.