How ethical are economists? Who cares?
Reuters reports that the world's biggest association of economists, the American Economic Association, isn't really interested in developing an ethics code.
Let's remember there were economists being paid by Wall Street firms arguing for deregulation.
The interesting part here is that the economists argue they don't need a code of ethics because they're not paid a lot of money. Funny, economists get paid more than nurses and teachers who have codes of ethics.
Economists are just as much to blame for the financial meltdown as the bankers. Possibly more. Most of them failed to see the weaknesses in financial markets. But they were not only blind. They rejected the possibility of unparalleled disaster because it did not fit their model of rational and efficient markets, of financial innovation effectively transferring risk, of market prices reflecting the state of the world and self-regulation being more appropriate than heavy-handed government intervention. They espoused the implicit view behind the standard economic models: that markets and economies are basically stable and that when they go off course, it's a temporary blip. And they ignored phenomena that produced results radically different from their models. And of course, they were being paid by Wall Street to come out with these lines.
Old habits die hard and they know which side their bread is buttered. That's why they don't want a code of ethics.
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