The despair bubble

Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practise neither a science nor an art but a bad game of darts. Boozed up on shoddy theory and meaningless statistics, they wobble to the oche of public life, hurl an arrow at the backboard, then blame the flight, the lighting, anything but their own incompetence, when it falls to the floor.

So why listen? Why bother with their endless fainting fits over the slightest flicker in the numbers? When they try to tally the Office of National Statistics’ claim that the British economy shrank by 0.7 per cent in the three months to June with the CBI’s manufacturing survey, which shows cautious optimism, or the obvious advantages of shrinking the deficit with the effect of the eurozone crisis on exports, they are quickly lost in a macroeconomic fog. It is easier at that point to cry wolf than keep trying to make sense of it all.