Economics has displaced clergy as society’s untouchable oracles despite crisis failure

Evidence

And yet the profession has not really suffered any dire consequences from the litany of embarrassments enumerated above. Economists are still invited to talk shows, profiled in The New Yorker and PBS Newshour and BBC Newsnight and the Wall Street Journal, respectfully solicited for their opinions without being ridiculed openly (even on the recurrent occasions when any pair of them sequentially asserts A and not-A with a straight face). Orthodox economists propound a neoclassical orthodoxy awash in waves of willingly submissive students, are paid salaries frequently second only to the research MDs at their universities, and allowed to preach the self-congratulatory proposition that they remain in firm possession of a self-confident science. Under the influence of the brief uprising known as the Occupy movement in 2011, when a group of students noisily walked out of Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics lecture at Harvard, it was treated as some passing undergrad hijinks by the press: Who were they kidding? Economists have been treated with relative impunity even on The Colbert Report. They are continually importuned to prophesy: Is the crisis over yet? Will things get better? Where should I park my pitiful 401(k) account? Economists, it appears, have unexpectedly displaced the clergy as the untouchable Delphic oracles in modern society. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 550

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that economists displaced the clergy as Delphic oracles — with the Colbert Report, Mankiw walkout, salary data — is a strong lead for a piece on the priesthood of expertise and the social function of credentialed prophecy.