Economistas

O economista Noah Smith escreveu um artigo onde comenta que os economistas costumavam ser os sacerdotes dos mercados livres, mas agora eles são apenas um bando de engenheiros. "...In 2012 interview about the future of energy, Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert Laughlin exclaimed: “Economists are idiots!… They just sit around making theories!” And as recently as the mid-1980s, he was right. As economist Dan Hammermesh found in a recent study, the majority of the papers published in top econ journals in 1963, 1973, and 1983 were theoretical papers. But in recent decades, the digital age has dumped a torrent of new data on the economics world, even as new theories have become harder and harder to think up. The result is that, as of 2011, the percentage of theoretical papers had fallen to under 30%. In recent years, the hot technique has been “structural estimation,” which is a sort of blend of theory and empirical work".