An interesting review of two books, Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economists' Hour and Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man, are about the triumph of the economists in public policy, and also latterly public discourse, and what harm that has wrought.  A lot of harm, they think.

Our reviewer is Paul Romer, himself an economist of no mean repute.  The review is fine, summarizing the books and urging humility.  Occasionally it is more than that.

Once, he makes an interesting tactical suggestion: 

"a system that delegates to economists the responsibility for answering normative questions may yield many reasonable decisions when the stakes are low, but it will fail and cause enormous damage when powerful industries are brought into the mix. And it takes only a few huge failures to offset whatever positive difference smaller, successful interventions have made."

That's worth thinking about.

Also, he ends the piece this way, urging a kind of normative abstemiousness on his fellow economists:

"The hard part is to say no when government officials look to economists for an answer to a normative question. Scientific authority never conveys moral authority. No economist has a privileged insight into questions of right and wrong, and none deserves a special say in fundamental decisions about how society should operate. Economists who argue otherwise and exert undue influence in public debates about right and wrong should be exposed for what they are: frauds."

I too am all for scapegoating.  I too think economists are The Worst Thing Ever.  They surely beat their kids at higher rates than the rest of us do!  Mosters, every one of them!  Hang 'em high!  Then again, much of this complaint could have been lodged against the lawyers and theologians who ran things in seventeenth century England, too.  And it would have been right as well. 

I suppose we should roundly and vigorously condemn the economists, but we should also wonder how to do better, and who, when we pitch the economists over the side, will be there, eager to replace them.  Evolutionary psychologists?  God help us. 

Maybe the problem was not the economists, but what we, in the form of our governors, did with their advice.  Maybe the problem is not with the counsellors, nor with the counsel, but with the counseled.  In the Middle Ages, there was a whole genre of guidance for rulers on how to listen to advice--not just THAT they should listen, but HOW they should listen--and maybe we need to recover that.