Undue Reverence for Keynes’ Plausible Twaddle

Economics is not the kind of topic that excites the passions as does God or, say, Bruce Pascoe. The lower case ‘he’, as the inventor of Aboriginal agriculture, won’t mind the juxtaposition, I would suppose. Obviously, I can’t speak for the upper case ‘He’. But economics it is. Take it or leave it.

I am constantly struck by the ignorance of economics dressed up as expertise. It comes from federal Treasury, from the Reserve Bank and, of course, from the economics commentariat whether they are correspondents for news outlets or occupy positions in business or finance. It is not their fault. For example, people brought up in India might be Hindu or those in Egypt might be Muslim. It is a product of their environment. They can’t necessarily be blamed for following the paths they did. Choice usually didn’t enter into it.

Equally, if you are taught superficially plausible rubbish in an economics undergraduate course you might well regurgitate such rubbish. Unless, as with…