I think the economists are making it all up as they go along. I’m not sure any group of people can be so consistently wrong on so many levels.

Apparently the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits are anxious to stop writing all those bummer articles about the un and underemployed and the destruction of the global economy. I guess it’s just too Debbie Downer for them. So they’ve started the “Everything’s Getting Better” articles.

So here we are on the last day of 2010. Because New Years Day is on Saturday this year, a lot of people have the day off, joining all of us who are members of the long term un/underemployed in watching the world go by. But I can’t let the day go without highlighting a couple of end of the year news dump articles in today’s NY Times.

In The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature, Mark Sumner prefaces his exploration of Darwin’s theory of evolution – and of the power of selection to explain phenomena as diverse as the economic downturn, the “success” of patent medicines that don’t do much to cure what ails you, and the shape of the new TV season – with the reminder that what you think you know could well be wrong. Sumner argues that the set of erroneous beliefs to which most of us cling includes our sense of what Darwin’s own Darwinism actually asserts.

Econned by Yves Smith shows how economists persuaded the political and media elites that they knew what they were doing. Smith shows that they didn’t, and then shows how Wall Street traders and their bosses exploited the world those economists and their corporate sponsors created. The result was financial collapse. Economists aren’t held accountable, and neither are the people who profited.