David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2010) ("When Her Majesty the Queen paid a visit to the London School of Economics in November 2008, she asked how was it that no economists had seen the financial crisis coming. Six months later, the economists in the British Academy sent her a somewhat apologetic letter. 'In summary, Your Majesty,', it concluded, 'the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.' It is 'difficult to recall a greater example of wishful thinking combined with hubris,' they observed of the financiers, but went on to admit that everyone--presumably including themselves--had been caught up in a 'psychology of denial'. On the other side of the Atlantic, Robert Samuelson ... wrote in a somewhat similar vein: 'Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades ... and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it.' Yet the country's 13,000 or so economists seemed singularly disinclined to engage in 'rigorous self-criticism to explain their lapses'. Samuelson's own conclusion was that the economic theorists were too interested in sophisticated forms of mathematical model-building to bother with the messiness of history and that this messiness had caught them out. The Nobel Prize-winning economist .... Paul Krugman agreed (sort of). 'The economics profession went astray,' he wrote, 'because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.' The British economist Thomas Palley, in a follow-up open letter to the Queen, was even less generous: the profession of economics had become 'increasingly arrogant, narrow and closed minded', he wrote, and was completely unable 'to come to grips with it sociological failure which produced massive intellectual failure with huge costs for society'." Id. at 235-236. "The trouble in these times is that most people have no idea who Keynes was and what he really stood for, while understanding of Marx is negligible. The repression of critical and radical currents of thought--or to be more exact the corralling of radicalism within the bounds of multiculturalism and cultural choice--creates a lamentable situation within the academy and beyond, no different in principle to having to ask the bankers who made the mess to clean it up with exactly the same tools as they used to get into it. Broad adhesion to postmodern and post-structuralist ideas which celebrate the particular at the expense of big picture thinking does not help. To be sure, the local and the particular are vitally important and theories that cannot embrace, for example, geographical difference are worse than useless.... But when that fact is used to exclude anything larger than parish politics, then the betrayal of the intellectuals and abrogation of their traditional role become complete. Her Majesty the Queen would, I am sure, love to hear that a huge effort is underway to put the big picture into some sort of copious frame such that all can see it." "But the current crop pf academicians, intellectuals and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill equipped to undertake such a collective task. Few seem predisposed to engage in that self-critical reflection that Robert Samuelson urged upon them. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neoclassical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaulted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people's bankruptcies. After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there is nothing that be done about that!" Id. at 238-239. When one considers the shoddy legal systems which failed to properly regulate the financial industries, one can ask, why did no lawyers see the financial crises coming, resulting as it did in large part from faulty deregulation or non-regulation? The legal profession and legal academy suffer from the same arrogant, narrow and closed mindedness as does the economic profession, academy generally and most of the intellectual class. The refusal to truly engage in rigorous and honest critical thinking is the hallmark of American anti-intellectualism.).
