Don’t trust economists! This is the underlying message currently echoing in several parts of the world. Leading the pack are economists themselves, call them ‘dissident economists’. Professor Joseph Stiglitz, world acclaimed economist and Nobel Prize winner, recently said in a talk in New Delhi, “I blame the economists. They provided some of the arguments that led people to believe market results in regulating. The financial system needs some kind of regulation.” He said that there can’t be a freefall for an economy.

In the last 30 years, the influence of economists in policymaking grew. Started mainly by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, it soon became a transnational phenomenon. The privatisation, globalisation, deregulation, trickle-down economics and growth-based model became key policy measures, thought to alleviate conditions of poor. The World Bank (WB) pushed it vigorously. Several economists who worked at WB and International Monetary Fund (IMF) got decisive positions in several countries, including India.

Developing countries blindly copied such market models without prophesying its fallout. In India, the liberalisation poster boy Manmohan Singh, too, followed diktats of the WB, IMF and western model to tune the economic policies in the 1990s is well known.

The message was simple: show the third-world countries that the gross development product (GDP) led growth can achieve economic success. Though it brought an economic boom for brief period, but the consequences seem to be bitter. A lot of rich people only became richer. But at what cost?

Now, the faulty economic policies have been tearing the governments across the continents. The shock turns to anger across the world as there are social unrest and strife in many nations. Few countries are on the verge of economic collapse: Greece and Italy. Even the US is not spared as there is great social discontentment. ‘Occupy Wall Street Protest’ shows how trickle-down economics didn’t work. Stiglitz said that the policies of the Washington Consensus (WC) were basically anti-poor. “That the benefits of growth would trickle down to all its citizens…WC was not concerned with the development,” he said.

Statistics reveals there have been more than 100 financial crises around the world in the last thirty years. The latest financial bubble burst has been more global in nature and its consequences sharper than ever and now hanging on life support system. Instead of economy being globalised, there is globalisation of protests. Thomas Pogge, professor of philosophy at Yale University, blames the global rules for creating worldwide problem. “The global rule and super national rules are increasingly burdensome against progress for the poor,” says Pogge.

So where did economists go wrong? Firstly, the economists could not go beyond statistics. They designed flawed risk models by misjudging macroeconomic indicators. Secondly, the policy maneuverings were done mostly in seminars, board rooms and through power point presentations, which had no real connection with the aam aadmi. “It is because too much theorising has come into policy implementation,” says French political economist Jean-Pierre Lehmann.

Another critique of the neo-liberal policies and well-known economist Prabhat Patnaik recently said that growth by its nature is poverty engendering in India. He gives an example of how during the Hindu rate of growth, there was more per capita foodgrain availability in the country than now.

In India, the economist prime minister and his cabal of learned financial advisers have not been able to stem the rising inflationary measures for more than three years. They have also failed to push growth rate in double digit. The country has a curious case now. It has seen both the political class and economists ruling the country in the last 64 years of independence from the British. But the face of the country has not changed as it should have been. So, who should Indians trust now? God knows best.