This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 29th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The economics profession has largely told the public that the economy, in scare quotes, is a big machine that just needs the right tweaking to keep humming along.

In his new book, Specialization and Trade, Economist Arnold Kling attempts to reintroduce economics

by explaining that the economy is an

evolutionary system. We spoke this week. Everybody got something really

really wrong during the financial crisis and that as far as I can tell so far I could be wrong, did not bring about

some come to Jesus meeting on economics more generally.

Why didn't that happen?

That's a good question.

I think that there were efforts launched

by various groups and organizations to try to re-examine economics

and so they called in all the people who've gotten things wrong and said what's your

solution? Not surprisingly people didn't deviate much

from where they were. In fact there's a joke that goes around the profession that

everyone has written a book since the financial crisis that explains why basically

says the reason the financial crisis happened is, can be explained by the views that I held beforehand and so it proves that I was right all along.

So is this an example? I mean we all project a lot of our biases into almost every endeavor of activity, but it seems that economics is uniquely suited for that

kind of projection that is, you know, well, I'm still right.

Yeah, and in fact this shows how right I was

Now I think that illustrates how right I am in the in my latest book in saying that economics is not a science.

If it were a science, then people couldn't be making

those kinds of contradictory claims.

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