Economists: laissez-faire or plain lazy?

„Two prominent medical researchers reviewed hundreds of thousands of records on infant and childhood mortality dating back over the last eight centuries. They discovered that over the vast majority of this 800-year period, only around half of newborns survived to adulthood; they concluded that we should not expect our children to live to adulthood.

Anyone reading this paragraph should be fuming at the absurdity of this sort of extrapolation. Almost everywhere in the world, from the 13th to the 19th centuries, people lacked the healthcare advances that we take for granted. They lacked modern sanitation advances, like sewage disposal and clean drinking water; their diets were often grossly inadequate; and they didn't have the benefits of modern medicine, like antibiotics. The enormous differences in these and other areas make it absurd to extrapolate about health outcomes from prior centuries to the present situation.

While the absurdity of such extrapolations on health outcomes should be immediately apparent, for some reason, those in policy circles think it is perfectly reasonable to make the same sort of extrapolations when it comes to economic outcomes. Two prominent economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, did an extensive examination of financial crises over the last eight centuries. They found that the after-effects of these crises tend to be longlasting, with economies often taking a decade or more to get back to normal levels of output.”