Famous economists responded to 2008 by defending their unchanged textbooks

Evidence

It takes some thick skin not to cringe at the performance of four famous economists at the January 2010 meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta, in a session expressly titled, “How Should the Financial Crisis Change How We Teach Economics?” Three out of the four could not even be bothered to actually address the posited question, so concerned were they to foster the impression that they personally had not been caught with their pants down by the crisis. The fourth thought that simply augmenting his existing textbook with another chapter defining collateralized debt obligations and some simple orthodox finance theory would do the trick. Things got even worse in the subsequent year, with figures such as Alan Blinder and John B. Taylor touting new editions of their undergraduate macrotheory textbooks by reassuring instructors that the crisis did not require them to change anything they had been teaching for years. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 461

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘The discipline that couldn’t admit it failed’ — how academic professions institutionally resist paradigm change even when discredited, using textbook inertia as the mechanism.
• XREF: Blinder and Taylor’s textbook defense parallels the ‘we always knew this’ strategy documented in Mirowski’s critique of the economics ‘thought collective’ — also echoes Kuhn’s observation that paradigms rarely yield to crisis alone. — connects to: Mainstream economists admit failure to predict the crisis but resist overhauling the discipline — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 517; The 2008 crisis debate collapsed to first-year textbook economics. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 802

Broader Connections

• Mainstream economists admit failure to predict the crisis but resist overhauling the discipline #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 517