The Dismal KingdomMarch/April 2020 157
institutions more leeway and in doing so
helped create the conditions that led to
the ¥nancial crisis. He did so in the name
o economics—indeed, in the public
consciousness, he came to personify the
¥eld. But his opposition to regulation
was invulnerable to evidence. Until he
took control at the Fed, he was a hired
gun, ready to defend ¥rms in the
¥nancial sector from regulators who
tried to protect the public. In this role,
he reportedly said that he had “never
seen a constructive regulation yet.” I
economists continue to let people like
him de¥ne their discipline, the public
will send them back to the basement,
and for good reason.
The alternative is to make honesty
and humility prerequisites for member-
ship in the community o economists.
The easy part is to challenge the pre-
tenders. The hard part is to say no when
government o¾cials look to economists
for an answer to a normative question.
Scienti¥c authority never conveys moral
authority. No economist has a privi-
leged insight into questions o right and
wrong, and none deserves a special say
in fundamental decisions about how
society should operate. Economists who
argue otherwise and exert undue
inuence in public debates about right
and wrong should be exposed for what
they are: frauds.∂After more than a decade o damage
to their neighborhood, the citizens o
Chicago Lawn watched as the o¾cials
who would not even look into that
damage saved the banks that had caused
it. No amount o econosplaining could
change the message this conveyed:
everybody has to accept what the
market gives them—except the people
who work in the ¥nancial sector. To-
day’s record-low unemployment rate
shows that ten years on, the most direct
harm from the ¥nancial crisis has
healed. But deeper wounds remain.
Wage growth for workers has been slow,
and the crisis caused a massive and
long-lasting reduction in incomes across
the world—and perhaps an even longer-
lasting populist backlash against the
political institutions o many countries.
A NEW HUMILITY
In their attempt to answer normative
questions that the science o economics
could not address, economists opened the
door to economic ideologues who lacked
any commitment to scienti¥c integrity.
Among these pretend economists, the
ones who prized supposed freedom
(especially freedom from regulation) over
all other concerns proved most useful—
not to society at large but to companies
that wanted the leeway to generate a
pro¥t even i they did pervasive harm in
the process. When the stakes were high,
¥rms sought out these ideologues to act
as their representatives and further their
agenda. And just like their more repu-
table peers, these pretend economists
used the unfamiliar language o eco-
nomics to obscure the moral judgments
that undergirded their advice.
Throughout his entire career,
Greenspan worked to give ¥nancial