The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports that a Federal Reserve bureaucrat funded with American tax dollars believes that the average blogger isn’t qualified to blog about economics
:
Kartik Athreya, senior economist for the Richmond Fed, has written a paper condemning economic bloggers as chronically stupid and a threat to public order. Matters of economic policy should be reserved to a priesthood with the correct post-doctoral credentials, which would of course have excluded David Hume, Adam Smith, and arguably John Maynard Keynes (a mathematics graduate, with a tripos foray in moral sciences).
The dripping condescension of Athreya’s paper is perhaps best captured in his own words. “I’m simply less comfortable with ex cathedra pronouncements and speculations than the people I have named.” Since his argument turns on his own ex cathedra pronouncements, it’s hard not to laugh at the irony.
