Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit In The Next Global Financial Meltdown, Second Edition

It’s Not an Academic Book

In addition to the reasons discussed in the previous chapter about why many economists don’t like the ideas in this book, they also don’t like the book because we are not playing by their rules. In most academic circles, an author has to be published in a refereed (peer reviewed) journal to have any credibility; otherwise academics aren’t going to be very interested in the book. That actually makes a lot of sense in some ways because there are plenty of crackpots out there and this is a good way of filtering them out. However, a problem arises when the academics are fundamentally wrong in their analyses, and someone outside the inner circle has something of merit to say. Then the policy becomes a real negative because academics are not exposed to different viewpoints (in part because they don’t want to be).

In addition to the problem of exclusivity, academics often have the problem of a narrow focus. A narrow focus is good—in fact, it is absolutely necessary for good analysis—but only if you have a solid understanding and a good theory of what is going on in the broader context. For example, as we discussed in Chapter 9 if you don’t understand continental drift, trying to study minute changes in the Appalachian Mountains isn’t going to improve your understanding of how they were formed. Without a good overall theory to provide a larger context, a narrow focus is just a way of avoiding the hard work of developing a good overall theory that explains what ...