Economists Couldn't See This Coming, Which is Their Only Job

This is from a New York Times interview with Jamie Galbraith:

Do you find it odd that so few economists foresaw the current credit disaster?
Some did. The person with the most serious claim for seeing it coming is Dean Baker, the Washington economist. I saw it coming in general terms.

But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis?
Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.

What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?
It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.

You’re referring to the Washington-based conservative philosophy that rejects government regulation in favor of free-market worship?
Reagan’s economists worshiped the market, but Bush didn’t worship the market. Bush simply turned over regulatory authority to his friends. It enabled all the shady operators and card sharks in the system to come to dominate how we finance.

As a social scientist, it irks me when the opinions of economists are given such a great weight in public and political discussions, yet the opinions of people like me who actually do research rather than just spout the same ideology over and over are relegated to the dustbin of ivory-tower eggheads who don't know anything.

But what makes it even more insulting, is that economists are usually wrong, and often in spectacular ways such as this. And yet, they're still the highly-paid experts everyone listens to. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose...