Steve Sailer has a post up tonight on the impracticality of economics. Well, that’s what it seems to be about, but I could be missing the point. I could be off-base, but I’ve always got the sense Sailer has little respect for economics. I’ve said on many occasions that it falls somewhere below palm reading on the empiricism scale so I could be reading my own bias into his work. It is manifestly true that the business world has little use for economics majors. Everyone I know with an econ degree from an elite school either went to work for the government, Wall Street or went off to graduate school. On the other hand, I’ve met thousands of accounting majors at all levels of business. In almost every case, they were state school products. Some got an MBA later in life as they levered up the corporate pyramid.

Jim Manzi, when he wrote for National Review, would go off on economics, comparing it to witchcraft. In fact, I exchanged e-mails with him once on that very topic. IIRC, I called it witchcraft and he said I was unkind to witches. His excellent book on trial and error is, in subtle ways, a broadside on the economics profession as well as the public policy barnacles that cling to the profession. Manzi is a nuts and bolts guy who made his money selling software to people. Sailer, from what I can tell, made his money in business. Business people, in my experience, have a special contempt for theoretical economics. I suspect the reason is they see economists in the same way sports coaches see the press corp. That is, they are a group of self=proclaimed experts who have never got their hands dirty. It reminds me of this classic movie scene:

I disagree with Steve about why economists get sucked into the open borders and free trade uber alles stuff. Culture is hard. The human condition is depressing. The suicide cult we call liberalism makes both even more difficult. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble in the academy by sticking up for culture. Denying the perfectibility of man could get you branded a Christian, which means the end of your career. If you ant to work in economics and you are not a socialist, the way to survive is to avoid culture and the human condition. Stick to the pseudo-emperical stuff and you inevitably fall into libertarianism. Liberalism and libertarianism hold one thing in common. They exclude all the stuff that makes human societies work.

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