The Humble Economist

I learned a lot from this long-form interview with George Mason economics professor Pete Boettke. One of my few regrets from my time at GMU is that I never took any of his classes. I try to make up for it by regularly reading Coordination Problem, where Boettke blogs with several other distinguished economists.

Here’s his response when the interviewer asks him why so many Austrian-influenced economists are libertarians. The correlation isn’t due to ideology:

What the position makes you have is not libertarianism, or anything like that, but humility. The economist is nothing more than a student of society, and any economist that tries to represent themselves as a saviour of society should be subject to ridicule.