...for his tour de force The Predator State, ought to encourage other economists; those who continue to preach the gospel, while having lost all faith. The mandatory self-censorship is a mostly unexpected and unsuspected epistemological barrier in the sad state of human affairs. What currently appears to be a vigorous and open debate about how to think about the financial crisis stays, for the main part, within fairly clearly delineated permissible lawns of discourse. Judging by the way that the media justify what they bring by quoting academics, the general public is certainly not aware of all this. University economics departments and business schools are notorious for guarding the epistemological barriers. Appointments, promotions, entire academic careers depend on prudent self-censorship. Climbing the ladders in these institutions is hardly possible without publishing articles that perhaps nobody will read but that are carried in top-rated journals. Such top-rated journals are the worst obstacles to original thought. Their function is to maintain orthodoxy. Their editors cannot conceive of this as being intellectually suspect. Once they showed doubt, their monumental claim that economics is an empirical science would be thrown overboard. And thus, those whose task it is professionally to facilitate and help steer...

...conspiracies, the manufacturing of consent by the media for instance. These circumstances are, to say the least, not conducive to seeing our situation as the result of runaway blind forces, uncontrolled by anyone. Which is probably why the obvious possibility, likelihood even, that what needs to be set straight is beyond the capacity of president Obama is paid no significant attention in the general commentary on what he is not doing. In all the critical or apologetic commentary about what President Obama has not yet done, or perhaps will never do, one thought glitters by its absence: the thought that Obama does not actually have the practical control over government entities that theoretically are under his control. He has no choice but to deal with an existing political system containing powerful entities living a life of their own, pursuing purposes rather different from the ones for which they were designed, and entities that are entirely out of touch with reality. The notion of a system with a capital S is not welcome among editors and commentators; it tends to imply the for them unacceptable notion that the country’s democracy is merely a front. It reeks of Marxism, for one thing....