Economists round on President over ‘lazy’ and ‘uninformed spiel’

9 comments
  1. Michael D is, as Michael McDowell once put it, an “unashamed socialist.”

    BUT, there is more than enough reason to question the global obsession with GDP and growth in the face of, as Michael D put it in his speech, “”ecological dystopia.”

  2. These kinds of articles annoy me as a reader. There are lots of economists quoted in that piece insisting that his remarks don’t reflect modern thinking or teaching about economics, but whoever wrote it didn’t think to actually give us some concrete examples of the substantive differences between the two. As it stands it’s basically just a he said/ they said situation with the reader left none the wiser.

  3. The joke about economists goes like this. A company owner needs to promote someone to be their deputy, so they think they’ll ask the same question of a few department heads. So he starts with the engineer, he asks “what is 2 multiplied by 2?”, to which the engineer answers “4, absolutely 4”.

    They ask the accountant the same question and the accountant answers “4, but with a ten percent margin of error either way.”

    They ask an economist the same question. The economist stands up, goes to the door and locks it, checks to make sure no one is listening, and then answers “what do you need 2 multiplied by 2 to be?”

    Outside of research most economists are shilling whatever their paymaster is selling.

    I remember Austin Hughes shamelessly defending the property bubble with the “sound fundamentals” slock but then he was no where to be found when the tide went out.

  4. Would any of these economists care to explain how unchecked, unlimited economic growth can be facilitated on a planet with finite resources?

  5. The president is dead right.
    When have you heard any Irish economist say that their views have changed due to the realisation that man-made climate change is destroying the planet? Not one.
    They are complete Neanderthals.

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