Professor Luigi Zingales says:

Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of politicians and ordinary people alike because it provides a theoretical justification for irresponsible behaviour. Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow this prescription. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists do exactly this. They tell politicians, who are addicted to spending our money, that government expenditures are good. And they tell consumers, who are affected by severe spending problems, that consuming is good, while saving is bad. In medicine, such behaviour would get you expelled from the medical profession; in economics, it gives you a job in Washington.

Peter Klein writes:

Zingales’s description applies equally well to the 1930s and 1940s, when the Keynesian consensus emerged. It’s important to remember that massive deficit spending to “cure” the Depression began with Hoover and Roosevelt in the early 1930s, long before the General Theory appeared. Keynes’s book did not propose a new direction for economic policy; it provided an allegedly scientific rationale for policies already in place, policies government officials were eager to defend and protect. . .

the Keynesian delusion afflicts not only policymakers, but professional economists as well. I’ve long suspected that the appeal of Keynes . . . is ultimately based on aesthetic, not scientific, grounds. Deep in their hearts, they just don’t like private property, markets, and individual choice. They don’t think ordinary people are capable of making wise decisions and think they, the elites, should be in charge.

I suspect that we will laugh derisively at these elites in future, but will do a lot of crying before that future arrives.

I watched a few minutes of a very bad movie the other day. The plot was that a dull witted underachiever had been transported into the future and found that he was much smarter than everyone else. I didn't catch the explanation of how this came to be, and didn't watch much of it since it was really bad.

The idea stuck with me since it is, in a sense, universal. Our current reality is that the smartest among us are very stupid as measured by the requirements of the tasks before us. If we had the wit to grasp just how dumb we were then perhaps we would focus on developing methods that took this fact into account rather than braying about our intelligence and expertise.