More Athreya smackdown

Just to add to the list of bloggers smacking down Kartik Athreya for his assertion that bloggers shouldn't talk about economics, we have great posts by Tyler Cowen, David Merkel, Jeffrey Harding, and Ambrose Evans-Evans-Pritchard, and a more-than-slightly unfair (but funny) one from Barry Ritzholtz. The money quote, IMHO, is this from Tyler Cowen:

I would say that economics is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And that's leaving out a few of the "reallys."

It's so hard that experts don't always do it well. The experts are constantly prone to correction by non-experts, by practitioners, by people who are self-educated economic experts but not professional economists, and by people who know some economics and a lot about some other field(s). It is very often that we -- at least some of us -- are wrong and at least some of those other people are right.