I love the Financial Times. There, I said it.
Why? Because Noam Chomsky told me to. Or, more accurately, Chomsky pointed out that the business press is for the people who actually run the show, and they need/demand accurate information. If you want to peak over their shoulders, it ain’t cheap, but it is there. The FT can hire the best, as far as I can tell. Is it perfect? Of course not. I triangulate with lots of other sources (including the Morning Star and Private Eye, among others).
The letters page of the FT is one of the wonders of the modern world. Especially when I have a letter in, which has happened once or twice over the last few years. And does again today.
Mario Rizzo (“Elite economics schools are a cosy echo chamber,” FT Letters September 14) paints a dismal picture of academic economists engaging in anti-competitive practices (oh the irony), as a kind of intellectual (or at least mathematical) cartel.
The problem is worse. Mainstream economics has had a dismal record of prediction. As John Kenneth Galbraith said “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology seem respectable.”
But the problem is even worse than that. For almost 50 years economists, guided by early papers by American economist William Nordhaus, have peddled the line that it would be cheaper to let climate change rip, because the clean-up would be cheaper – as a percentage of overall wealth – at some point in the future. That’s not working out so well, is it?
At more or less the time Galbraith made his observation, another economist, Kenneth Boulding snarked ‘Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.’
marchudson.net 
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