The gods must be crazy

Look at me marge, I am reading The Economist!

Did you Know Indonesia is at a crossroad?
Homer Simpson.

When I was young, long time ago, I saw a funny movie, with a guy whose name was Xi; he was
living in the Kalahari Desert with his San tribe, they were very happy because the gods had
provided everything they required to live. One day a Coca Cola glass bottle was thrown out of an
airplane, and fell to the earth without breaking. Xi and his San tribe couldnt understand why, it
was a gift from the gods, to the end Xi began a trip to return the bottle because that had caused
a lot damage in his tribe. In the same way, when the economist and policymakers considered
necessary interest rates start to rise, make a budget, cut in health and education. This way we, like
Xi, dont understand why the gods give us this present. Enjoy this trip to try to conclude, why
serious people like economist and policymakers do what they do in their jobs, and recognize the
famous people in the economic history who inspired to change the world in their time, their
eccentric personality, and maybe just maybe like the goods in the movie, we can finally
understand why the gods must be crazy.
The history of the economy as a science has always had a challenge; creating a theoretical model
for trying to understand, analyzing and designing ways to investigate relationships within social
systems. This exercise is the base in every single step in the line of history, for inventing economic
thought. This process begins with the change in social life; this is the key to understand why
different economists study the same phenomenon and get a diverse result.
Adam Smith is known as the father of modern economics who belonged to the physiocrats and
classical economists; they tried to develop ideas about the major changes in the history of
economy the industrial revolution. Smiths successors examined different ways to comprehend
the relation between capitalist and laboring class who produced and distributed national output.
Marx against the classical economist said the capitalist system castigated and exploited the
worker.

Since Marxs time, economics of all kinds of formations: communist, Keynesian, New Keynesian,
New Classical macroeconomics, Socialism; tried to make a new knowledge for people like Homer
Simpson, so he can understand why Indonesia is at a crossroad.
Economics made a new comprehension about social systems and their actors, but the different
studies were influenced by the personality from the economist who worked on them.
In the followings lines, Id like to show, what kind of temperament the most important economics
in history had, and how this character influenced in their work.
The father or modern economics is our first guest, Adam Smith who was a moral philosopher and
all his life used the French citation: laissez faire, laissez passer mind state must be out of the
economy, but his father was a controller of the Customs in Kirkcaldy. He dedicated all his life to
defend that the free trade and free markets could regulate themselves, but he was living all the
time with his mother; so he never applied regulating himself, and when he tried, he went back
home.
Our second guest is Thomas Malthus who was an English cleric and scholar. He belonged to the
classical economics, and wrote: That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the
means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence
increase, and, that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept
equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice Malthus was a pioneering of birth control
methods. Curiously, he had one son and two daughters.
Our next guest, the third one, is Karl Marx; his work is an explanation of conflict between an
ownership class and dispossessed laboring. He called capitalism the dictatorship of bourgeoisie,
but Marx didnt have a job, and the biographer Silvia Nasar wrote: Marx never learned to properly
speak English and never visited an English factory despite living in England during his last thirty
years
The fourth visitor in this trip is maybe the most important form the modern economists whose
ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomic; John
Maynard Keynes 1st Baron Keynes belonged to Bloomsbury Group, this was an influential group
of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. In that group, the father of the
modern macroeconomics had bisexual relations during several years.
The fifth guest is Arthur Cecil Pigou who was a teacher in the University of Cambridge. His work is
famous for the application in welfare economics; the teacher Pigou also was famous because of
his misogynist behavior, and he didnt teach women in his class.

The last story is the case of Robert Lucas Jr, economist of University of Chicago who received the
Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1995 for his studies in Rational Expectations. One curiosity
with his wife, well his ex-wife is that in the document of divorce, she put on paragraph 6 Wife
shall receive 50 % of any Nobel prize... he won, and had to pay the middle of the reward to his
ex-wife.
In the universe of history of economic thought, you can find a lot of eccentric personalities about
people who study and change our social systems in the time, and their story is very different
comparing their work and their life; maybe with those examples, we can try like Xi, to understand
why the gods must be crazy.
For Xi and his San tribe, the Coca Cola bottle became a problem and for this reason, they decided
to give it back to their gods. For us, when have a lot money, it is a present from the gods, but in
the case of the NINJA crisis (No job no incomes in 2008 crisis), it was a nightmare. Oscar Wilde
said, When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayer maybe in our case the gods arent
perfect, they have an imperfection in their personality, perhaps this is because they make bad
decisions to maintain economic health, like Oscar Wild said, wish to punish. In any case, the
important thing is that the economists are humans, and they have a lot problems for modeling the
situations in our economic life, because the most important thing in the system is the human
behavior, and that my friends is a problem because we dont have a correct way for predicting
what the future will bring. From the time of Adam Smith and the problem with his independent
life, passing to Marx, Malthus Pigou, Keynes and the rational expectation of Lucas, this trip is
intended to end, because Xi gave back the bottle to his gods and never understood why they gave
him this present. Similarly, Homer tries to explain Marge why Indonesia is at crossroad.