Piero Sraffa (Rather than accepting marginalism, he attempted to revive Marx’s exploitation theory of interest with a cost-of-production theory of value).
Karl Marx (Convinced the world that all economic activity is a priori exploitative).
Silvio Gesell (Magic money theorist with the logic of a five year old).
Thomas Malthus (Put forth three of the greatest economic fallacies known to date).
Thorstein Veblen (Brought historicism to the U.S.)
John Maynard Keynes (Revived old Malthusian and Mercantilist fallacies).
Joan Robinson (Foretold of North Korean economic supremacy).
John Law (Left the French treasury flat broke, and ruined the currency in a mere five year period).
John Kenneth Galbraith (Proclaimed that increased fiscal spending would solve all of NYC’s problems. Of course, they increased spending by 400%, and things only got worse).
Paul Samuelson (Prophesized Soviet dominance by 1991, in 1988).
Dishonorable mentions: Gustav von Schmoller, Nicholas Kaldor, Robert E. Lucas.
Criteria: (1) Damage done to economics as a science, (2) lack of reasoning ability, (3) and intellectual dishonesty. I placed most of the weight on (2).
He’s not really much worse than every other pundit who pretends to understand economics IMO. To my knowledge he hasn’t scarred economic knowledge to the extent the other economists on the list have.
And I would have given Mark the #1 slot, but regardless…
I remember Rothbard saying something along the lines of “you won’t learn anything you don’t already know by reading Smith”, or to that extent. (I could be wrong and it could have been Mises…)
We could do a list called Economic Blunders of the Past 100 Years. Stating how many would undermine the future achievements of the government. They are always trying to out do themselves.
Even though the classicals were wrong and their arguments led to much confusion later in some respects, I wouldn’t be willing to include them on this list. They may not have been the best economists but they were far from the worst.
Now that you mention it, those that constitute the stock filler in a profession tend to be the worst. One man who tries to be original may be wrong. What about the men that believe him?
Never heard of this Gesell before, so a quick look at Wikipedia got me this (emphasis mine):
This obviously isn’t a complete representation of his ideas, but upon immediate inspection from what is given here he falls for two very obvious errors.
While these errors are very bad, they are ideas held by the vast majority of society. In this case, why is Gesell on the list? Is he one of the main reasons these ideas are popular today? Or is there something bigger Wikipedia failed to mention?
He believed that recessions where the inevitable result of an imbalance between money and commodities. This sounds reasonable enough, but his explanation of this phenomenon, and his conclusion’s, are anything but reasonable. The imbalance, according to Gesell, is the result of a disparity between the physical constitution of money (gold) and of all other commodities. The former never rusts, never rots, and is durable; while the latter rots and can be destroyed by natural disasters. Thus, the value of the former (gold/money) must depreciate and lose its permanency if balance is to be restored (between money and commodities). His solution, then, was to replace gold with paper money tickets with stamps on the back (easily inflated). This form of money would lose value over time (the stamps would expire over time, and when used), which would force consumption, and bring prosperity to the world! (…)
“Nobody should believe that he will find in Smith’s Wealth of Nations information about present-day economics or about present-day problems of economic policy. Reading Smith is no more a substitute for studying economics than reading Euclid is a substitute for the study of mathematics.”
~ Economic Freedom and Interventionism, p. 117
“Marx’s economic teachings are essentially a garbled rehash of the theories of Adam Smith and, first of all, of Ricardo.”