Others explain that it is the fault to no luck

In dinners in town, there are professions that it became difficult to confess. Marie found an ingenious device at a recent Paris evening. She began by confessing that she worked in a bank in full collapse... before exiting the top stating that it was in microcredit. Relief. But Patrick did not have this talent. All GB conceded as an economist. General consternation. Some of his colleagues dare even more leave except to go to very select dinners of the society of political economy where, at least, you can be sure not to make bad meetings.

Why therefore this indignity is not only national Because they did not see coming and they are unable to inform the output. Asked the son of Mr. Keynes, and nobody does. A few éminences come to public acts of contrition, with the same head as a Bill Clinton tacitly referring to Monica Lewinsky's dress. Others explain that it is the fault to no luck.

But it is not only the fault to no luck. Some economists have played the Cassandras and, as expected, they were not heard. Others are are burnt wings because they took for Icarus, pushed toward the Sun by pressure from their employers and the media. The Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow explains that forecasting is an art too complicated for economists long! Beyond that, it is their way of working that is involved in the failure to apprehend large shocks. If they did not see coming, it is that their vision is flanked by two walls: the hyper... and the computer.

The first specialisation. Once, the student in economics focused its efforts on a narrow subject to his thesis. Then, the more open minds extended little by little their field. They ended up having intelligence, in the original sense of the term the ability to "inter-ligere", link them to the different areas. They could then sweep of broad horizons. But economists battalions were inflated. More numerous, they have specialized. The nomenclature of reference, the Journal of Economic Literature, includes hundreds of topics, the Bayesian analysis to the obituaries of great alumni through the behavioral economics, agricultural finance and public health. For a career, better be Firecrest in the microdomain rather than elsewhere, where it may disturb other Kinglets. And as the competition reinforces, must be more to dig the trench. Difficult, at the bottom of the trench, see wide.

This trend is not confined to economists. It affects all scientists. It is also more difficult to find good generalists in literature, physics or medicine, because specialty better pay while limiting risk.

However, the computer had a very specific effect on the economy. As always, its researchers sought first... a scientific legitimacy. By giving the means of primarily myriads of digits, the computer provides the surety of the Queen in the hard sciences, mathematics. The Royal Academy of sciences of Sweden, which awards each year the famous Nobel Prize, does there not err. In recent years, it has distinguished mathematicians-economists as Edward Prescott, most often cited for its statistical filter for its monetary policy recommendations. And also of pure familiar as Clive Granger, who invented the way of proving the meaning of causality.

The problem is that many economists have, at the time, abandoned the economic reasoning. They passed sometimes Ethereal theory to an often radical empiricism. Become experts in number, they build and operate databases for example show the impact of a border on the retail price, the link between the age of entry to school and the wages obtained later, or the effect of the arrival of ships at the port of Los Angeles on ozone pollution in the region (examples of a recent weekly delivery of the National Bureau of Economic Research U.S.). They are the same kind of work that pharmaceutical laboratories testing to the fishing expedition the usefulness of new molecules. In a few years, they explain figures to support certain assets were more toxic than others, or how the crisis has further pushed debt here or there.

But to understand the crisis, and to find ways to detect the signs of the next, economists need to pass the wide-angle zoom. In other words, they will have to change completely from work method. What is reassuring, it is that they used.