How much are economists to blame for the financial crisis? Most of them, with perhaps the exception of Nouriel Roubini and Robert Shiller, failed to see the weaknesses in financial markets. They just didn't see it coming.

It's hard to go past this piece in the Weekly Standard by Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, which places the blame firmly on the doorstep of the dismal science. Basically, the entire science of economic forecasting needs to be called into question, he says.

"The economists I know are generally, as individuals, sober and cautious, the most respectable of all professors and in their honesty and reliability representing the best in bourgeois virtue,'' writes Mansfield. "But when they get together as economists, they give way to boyish irrational exuberance over the accomplishments and prospects of economics as a science ... The predictions of economists tend to give the impression that the economy can be predicted. Economists are intelligent people, well-connected and well-educated, gainfully employed in prestigious institutions. Although they rarely reach the top offices, they are often the top advisers to the top officers. So they seem to know what they are doing. They impart confidence in their predictions, which are often or mostly in the ballpark. Except when they are not, as at present. In a crisis the confidence they impart most of the time is exposed as overconfidence, a delusion that sets us up for surprise and disillusionment. We are not so surprised by the delusions of crowds and mobs-who does not know they are unreliable?-but that their delusions should be supported and promoted by scientists of the rank and caliber of economists might easily shake our confidence in the reliability of our elites and even of our scientific civilization."

British economist John Kay adds to the debate, pointing out that the fundamental mistake of economists is that they tried coming up with a theory for everything based on the assumption that markets were rational and efficient. Nothing could be further from the truth. Markets are also driven by fear and greed. "That people respond rationally to incentives, and that market prices incorporate information about the world, are not terrible assumptions," Kay writes. "But they are not universal truths either. Much of what creates profit opportunities and causes instability in the global economy results from the failure of these assumptions. Herd behaviour, asset mispricing and grossly imperfect information have led us to where we are today."

Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government concurs in this piece.

Rodrik writes: "The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot that there were many other models that led in radically different directions. Hubris creates blind spots. If anything needs fixing, it is the sociology of the profession."

So will the financial crisis result in a reappraisal of economics as a science. Don't hold your breath.