A short follow-up on the Blog's name

Why on Earth did we call this blog "Damned Economists"?

Is this a blog of sociologists, who bear a grudge against the economic profession? Or is it a symposium of politics students wishing to prove their own argument? No. After all, Matteo and I are studying economics and we are likely to become professional economists, sooner or later. We love economics. But it's not a blind love. The reason behind the name is much simpler.

Ten-some years ago a liberal Italian economist called Sergio Ricossa, wrote a short and ironic book on the history of economic thought. Guess the title? Exactly: Damned Economists, The idiocies of a non-science (Maledetti economisti, Le idiozie di una scienza inesistente; Rizzoli, 1996). In this book, now disappeared from the library shelves, Ricossa tells us a paradoxical story of a bunch of tribes, the Caines and all the other, struggling an endless fight for the truth; a not so veiled metaphor for the struggle recalled in our first post.

While in graduate school we were living among sociologists and political scientists. Not surprisingly we were also thinking differently from them and thus simply treated as "damned economists". So what economics does is to make us think different, except for when we (or you) live a "life among the econ"; if this is good or not, is essentially for you to decide.

(Source: the comics is from phdcomics.com)