I’ve been travelling for most of today (now back in Newcastle) which has cut the time available to write anything. So this will be a relatively short blog and focuses on the way in which my profession is always trying to reconstruct economic issues when they find some policy proposition uncomfortable. The vehicle to demonstrate this phenomenon is an article published by Bloomberg (February 10, 2012) – Sachs Says Krugman Is ‘Crude Keynesian’. It summarised the radio interview (mp3 link – running for nearly 15 minutes) with Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. The latter is well-known for providing advice to the old Soviet economies, which led to the massive transfer of public wealth to the private oligarchs via privatisation. Under Sachs’ guidance, the so-called “shock therapy”, hastily imposed deregulation, privatisation and the abandonment of price controls (on rent etc) on the previously planned economies – with disastrous consequences. In the Bloomberg interview, Sachs is highly critical of “macro” interpretations of the current problems – claiming that the major challenges are all micro in origin.