At the end of the WSJ piece (June 4, 2003) by Dallas Fed President ‘Sideshow Bob’ McTeer, the man who once proudly likened the ’New Economy’ to a slowly boiling frog which would stealthily make us more prosperous, who called the Bubble simply ‘too much froth’ on an otherwise welcome glass of beer, and who exhorted Americans to repair the damage wrought by the Twin Towers attack by ‘going out to buy an SUV’ (all quotes to be found on his cult-of-personality official website entries), he asks us to:
‘just think what Michael Dell and Bill Gates could have accomplished if they’d gotten degrees in economics.’
The answer, Bob, is that if it was YOUR sort of addle-pated economics, I’d still be typing this on a word processor, since a limited computer would be the size of a small car and would cost me north of $20,000, and I’d then be posting this rant in by snail mail, since no-one outside of NASA and the DOD would have any half decent software to run on the blessed thing in any case.
When it comes to a knowledge that ’Mr. Greenspan is an excellent example of someone making a big difference by applying good economics’, or that Keynes’ risible ’paradox of thrift’ tells us that while ‘individually, most consumers need to save more.... if all or many consumers start trying to save more, the economy will be in deep trouble’ - ignorance is clearly bliss!
