On economic ignorance

Madsen takes a poke today on his site at people who don't allow their ignorance of economics to stop them from making illiterate proposals.  In language considerably more temperate that Tim Worstall uses, Madsen suggests that some people think they can bring about a new economic reality simply by wishing it into existence, without the slightest idea of the complexities they are dealing with, or of the unintended consequences that their proposals might bring about:

This tendency seems nowhere more true than in economics.  The average ignoramus hesitates to propose how theoretical nuclear physics should proceed, but feels quite at easy making economic proposals that seem plainly daft to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the subject.  If anything, economics could well be more complex than theoretical nuclear physics because it deals with objects that are profoundly dissimilar in more respects. Yet some people think they can make a new economic reality simply by wishing it so.

Madsen is right.  Open your newspaper, watch television or read Hansard, and there you'll find scores of them, maybe hundreds. Economic illiteracy has never had it so good.