Why Theoreticians Dominate Economics
"I heard something similar recently from a friend who teaches economics at Oxford, who was bemoaning the fact that the course there is increasingly maths-based. His explanation is that maths-driven economics is so obscure and uninteresting to the outside world, that the academics who specialise in it can spend all their time in Oxford, taking over the faculty. By contrast, the economists whose work is empirical and expressed largely in English find themselves in demand in the outside world - and therefore do not have the time to block the forward march of the mathemeticians"
As Taleb says in the foreword to my Lecturing Birds, it is history written by the losers. The guys no one could care about end up dominating the department (and thus the outside world´s overall perception of the Economics discipline) PRECISELY because no one gives a damn about them. Darwinism in reverse! Those discarded by the world survive, those embraced by the world perish The freak no one wants to be around wins, precisely because of his unbearable freakishness. I mean, I totally concur. Have you ever met an orthodox, cloistered economist? Did you also have the feeling that you were talking to Frankenstein or some other type of weird creature? Someone very very freaky. Very very unpleasant.
No, I don´t mean nerds. Economists are not nerds (they wish). Bill Gates is a nerd, the Google guys are nerds, Steve Jobs is a nerd. The world needs nerds, we love them, we want them, we embrace them, we admire them, we envy them, we want to be like them. But who the heck would want to be like an orthodox cloistered economist, envy them? Orthodox economists are the wrong kind of geek. Completely noncreative, just exam-taking idiot savants who had no option but to get straight As because they could not do anything else with their lives. And they know that full well, thus their Torquemada-like repressive and persecutoty attitude towards those more creative, more dynamic, more wordly, more brilliant. And thus their incontrollable cynicism and to-the-bone intellectual corruption.
Best thing I ever did in my entire life was spend my Economics undergraduate years doing anything but studying (dogmatic, stubbornly orthodox) Economics
