The Corruption of Economics

Some years ago, The Economist carried a lead editorial, ‘The puzzling failure of economics’. The frank admission was provoked by the publication of a new edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economist. The editorial concluded that it ‘is not a failure of economics, in fact, but of modern [neo-classical] economics’.
The authors argue there is nothing puzzling about this failure. They document how the integrity of economics as a discipline was deliberately compromised towards the end of the 19th centur...