Če mislite, da so največje gorje povzročili samo križarski pohodi, španski konkvistadorji, cerkvena inkvizicija in komunistične revolucije, niste dobro informirani. Prezrli ste ekonomsko revolucijo, ali bolje – revolucijo ekonomistov. Tistih, ki so od konca 1960. let prevzeli vpliv nad ekonomskimi politikami in politike prepričali, da je ključni problem manjše dinamike rasti v preveč države, preveč regulacije, previsokih davkih in premajhni neenakosti.
Binyamin Applebaum, član uredniškega sveta New York Timesa, je napisal novo knjigo na to temo “The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society“, ki se čudovito bere. Spodaj je začetni izsek iz njegovega kratkega povzetka.
In the early 1950s, a young economist named Paul Volcker worked as a human calculator in an office deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He crunched numbers for the people who made decisions, and he told his wife that he saw little chance of ever moving up. The central bank’s leadership included bankers, lawyers and an Iowa hog farmer, but not a single economist. The Fed’s chairman, a former stockbroker named William McChesney Martin, once told a visitor that he kept a small staff of economists in the basement of the Fed’s Washington headquarters. They were in the building, he said, because they asked good questions. They were in the basement because “they don’t know their own limitations.”
