Writes Josh Plotkin, a 19 year-old Mises U. 2009 Alumnus:

I recently attended a conference at the University of Southern California on the “Great Recession” as they’re calling it now. The first panel of speakers spoke on the Federal budget and their guesses on what the debt would be in 2085. That their models were perfectly linear should seem ridiculous to anyone who has even glanced at historic debt figures, but this room full of professional economists had nothing critical to say about anything that was presented. During the discussion that followed I said to the panel “Since none of the models you’ve shown today have turned out to be accurate in trying to predict whatever it is they are predicting, why does this science continue to use methods that are clearly inadequate.” As I was saying this, the whole room burst into laughter at my comment that they haven’t accurately forecasted anything, and one of the panelists even acknowledged that it was a valid question. Alan Auerbach of UC Berkeley responded by saying that they have to use their best guess about reality when they form the assumptions that they use for their models. I started asking a question about the implications of using these models to form policy, but I was interrupted and we were sent to lunch. A few people came up to me at lunch, and we had a few good laughs at some of the absurdities that we had heard earlier. A man with the LaRouche PAC who was there summed up the state of economics today with his statement that “They are all insane, all of them certifiably insane.”

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.