Few intellectual activities are more mischievous when done poorly than economics or history. The power of fallacious economic reasoning or fallacious historical example to damage society is obvious: the pseudo-economics of mercantilism has been reducing trade and protecting vested interests for many centuries; the pseudo-history of the Aryan “race” lent dignity to German fascism. The combination of bad economics and bad history in bad economic history is pernicious.
The above quote is from page 453 of Deirdre McCloskey’s June 1976 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, “Does the Past Have Useful Economics? sourced from Café Hayek’s Professor Don Boudreaux
The above quote reflects on much of how the mainstream thinks and what they practice today, e.g. inflationism.
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