Okay, didn't Smith call economics something along the lines of "the science of policy makers"? I only say that so as not to sound terribly "po-mo" in the direction I'm going next... because really I've been (trying to) scrutinizing the ins and outs this downturn as if it were a lump on my balls for the past few months.
But again and again, thanks to my revoltingly philosophical outlook, I keep coming back to the same point. Isn't any interpretation of the supposed "cause" of the crisis inherently biased? I mean we look at the housing bubble. That was "caused" by the dot-com bubble or, you know, low-interest rates... whatever you want... there's an interpretation for everyone interested.
So what the hell do we do? We could flee to the "facts". Those peskily seductive little devils which crop up in our major publications. We could run off those (already interpreted and theoretically filtered) facts - what the philosophers would refer to as unreflective empiricism - in order to come to what usually amount to short-term opinions about the crisis.
Sure that's nice. But there's two big problems here:
(1) It ignores any long-term dynamics - which is impossible anyway because, as some Greek once said: you can never stand in the same river twice.
(2) It tends not to put forward any other interpretations for the facts which have been presented. Sure the interest rates contributed to the housing bubble, which contributed to the speculation which..... etc.... so all we have to do is change the interest rates..... etc.....
So, I'm back to Smith. Smith, and perhaps possibly Marx, tried to put forward a "science of policy makers"... or at least an outline, a sketch, a discourse. All I can say truthfully is this: lets do our best... and not be particularly worried!