Jeffrey Snider, here:
As much as these specialists of economic canon project their abilities as something like science, the reduction of economic benchmarks for success shows that it is nothing more than ideology, more closely operating as religion than science. Science is observation, leading to predictable and replicable results. Everything about the past five years is the opposite for the orthodox economist. Everything about the Panic of 2008 was as well - there was no predictability nor replicability in any of the orthodox models or theories. It is all blind faith.
The economy is falling apart, not recovering as you hear from every mainstream outlet. It is a false narrative given cover by the fact that the very definition of recovery has been altered into something that only a few years ago would be easily recognizable as dire malfunction. Even in the highly adjusted statistical economic accounts that show as such are now couched as if they are representative of the opposite, as their meaning has been subverted by this ideology. And where measures of economic accounts clearly diverge from that narrative, such as the labor force participation and the more recent decline in the labor force itself, it is ignored as irrelevant to the heroic monetary chronicle.
