You can safely take that a step further:
Harvard is a jobs program for retards.
Discussion
In a free market, an economist who gets an economic prediction wrong gets fired and becomes a potential liability for a future employer. Why would I hire an analyst who makes a wrong prediction about an investment by a factor of 1000? Such a person might better be suited for unclogging toilets, blowing leaves off the street or performing other, more useful community services in exchange for money.
In academia, the economist can just make up a reason he was wrong, provide ad hoc explanations for their failure, then get a book deal and a career promotion. They can continue living in the illusion they are creating value for society, while in reality they are actively destroying it. And this illusion is maintained by taxation.
tl;dr this person is a fucking moron
The first part would be a terrible policy and is not at all the standard economists, or any scientists, are held to on the market.
You’re directionally correct, though, in that there would be more accountability for track records.
I would not hire an analyst who was wrong. If I could choose between someone who was right and someone who was off - by a factor of a 1000 in this retard's case, I would always choose the better candidate. This isn't a controversial opinion.
The way academia functions today is that researchers are funded to publish papers, regardless of their quality. Just pick any study in the field of nutrition or exercise and you'll see how laughable they are. Even the hard sciences are having problems, but that's another topic.
Directionally, we are bitcoiners, which makes this particular Harvard economist's opinion irrelevant :).
Being wrong is a basic part of doing science. You would be imposing terrible incentives that would keep researchers from trying to understand all but the most trivial things.
Whether it’s controversial or not, it’s very dumb.
Being wrong and paying for your mistakes is very much human. Nobody is infallible. Even Ray Dalio made mistakes, and these mistakes cost him and his investors millions of dollars. We call this having skin in the game. He eventually learned because of his mistakes and became an even better investor.
But academics don't pay for their mistakes. They get promoted and publish books. They don't learn, instead they leech off the taxpayer and essentially fail upwards. Why? No skin in the game = no incentive to learn and adapt. It's fiat science.
We aren’t disagreeing about the value of accountability. You seem to not understand that science inherently involves being wrong and learning from it in a systematic process.