Economics - A Course in Futility

Disclaimer: I am not an economist and know very little about economics but am prepared to trash it.

Personal Background. I was taking Econ 101 at UCLA. First thing on the board was a simple graph showing the correlation between price and supply. The higher the price, the more the supply. The next graph showed the relationship between price and demand. The higher the price, the less the demand. What followed was an X on the graph showing the equilibrium point. The concept of elasticity was introduced. All that went fairly well. Then trouble started. The graphs started to shift. And it dawned on me: "Oh my God! They are trying to graph unpredictable human behavior." That was the last economic class I ever took. The last one at UCLA anyway.

I transferred to UC Berkeley. I took another economics class. That one I enjoyed. It contrasted John Kenneth Galbraith planned economy with Milton Freedman capitalism. I got an A+ on my final and an A in the course. I argued in favor of Galbraith and the professor liked that. What did you expect? I was at UC Berkeley, not the University of Chicago. Oh, and I quoted the professor whenever I could on the final.

To be sure, I liked neither Galbraith's or Friedman's positions entirely even though both were at times perfectly convincing. Away from school and in the real world, my interest in economics began to decline and my opinion of economists is at a disdainful low.

Opinion. With volumes of published economic treatises that are available for these supposedly brilliant economists around the world today with Nobel prizes to study, one would assume that their collective knowledge and intelligence, theories and models run with super computers would have been capable of designing a workable economic plan that would not have brought the world economy to the brink of collapse, but that assumption is wrong.

The world economy with all its debt and mismatched spending and borrowing by countries, businesses large and small down to the individual is on its way to a complete meltdown. Weren't economists supposedly the very people whose task was to prevent such a disaster, one that I believe is too big and too late to contain? The United States economic nuclear explosion had occurred and the fallout that began last week was just the beginning.

The economists have failed. Economics has failed. Neither supply side nor demand side economics is better than letting the market take off freely, driven by profit, greed, betrayal, fraud and fear on the one hand and politics on the other.

From the list, I have deliberately omitted two other forces in the market, reason and conscience, for I believe that if present, their combined effect is negligible and if the market were truly rational, that is reasonable without being intellectually dishonest, and conscionable, it will not fail. Instead, it will prosper with true prosperity rather than prosperity as a result of a) debt and b) unreliable and falsely optimistic economic forecasts that rely on the very dollar that is unsupported by worth but by debt, c) an imaginary rational market and d)by implication an imaginary conscionable and honest populace.