Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's a very real value, but it's a mistake to believe that
that what happens in real economies is completely discernment in these kind of mechanistic ways.
It isn't.
Is it all billiards?
We're returning for the last word to Chicago, where there's one more economist I'd been keen to talk to.
Ragu Rajan foresaw not only the possibility of a financial crash, he nailed incentives in banking as the likely cause.
I wanted to know whether economics, through its language and ideals of laws, models and forces, had deceived itself, and others, with ideas of physical certainty and precision, which in the end were its downfall.
Someone should come to you and say, Raghu, you study a science.
This is a social science.
But you don't sound like a scientist to me.
You're placing the disagreements really on matters of empirical degree.
You're not placing them in terms of ideological position or fundamental beliefs in the superiority of markets, say, over governments or whatever.
You don't have to say those kind of things still to find an enormous amount of leeway in what economics should tell us to do.
I admired Raghu's reasonableness.
Economics for him is a long and patient game of small gains.
Every problem that emerged in the crash was being actively discussed beforehand in some corner of economics, he says.
But he readily concedes that we haven't yet cracked growth.
We still evidently haven't cracked the business cycle.
And you have to ask why, despite decades of mechanics these biggest of economic basics elude us.
One answer is that it's to do with something moody, maybe irrational, the human factor that makes the economy unstable.
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