In so doing, they would attain Keynes’s ambition: for economists to become “humble, competent people on a level with dentists.”77 Such professional humility is dangerous. Economists who compare themselves to dentists will basically accept their society as it is. This would be fine if reducing variance were the only task for economists to perform. But in the real world, economists are the main defense against the systematic errors that are the foundation for numerous bad policies. If they look the other way, these mistakes go largely unchecked. Nothing is more likely to make economists desert
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