"Fuckyounomics: How Nobody in the World Knows Jack Shit Except Economists"

This is how the average professional economist thinks of you lot, for all that you pay his wages; you’re a bunch of mugs who are incapable of understanding anything and just react like children to whatever’s dangled in front of your nose. It’s another of the many scandals of the profession, it is taught in the universities, and you can see it in more or less every popular book entitled something like “Fuckyounomics: How Nobody In The World Knows Jack Shit Except Economists”.

In Harry Potter novels, magic users call non-magic users "Muggles". Magic users are powerful, trade in information and are privy to the arcane arts. 

Greg Mankiw likens the economist to the magic user of the Harry Potter world. 

The truth is that the economist uses models to understand the behaviour of people and their interactions when exchanging one good for another by ABSTRACTION. We are however pretty much interested in how people decide between alternatives subject to limitations such as time, income. Lately, we've even begun to use economic tools of analysis in figuring out how much a dollar of clean air is worth. 

We like to use the dollar value of an outcome not because (1) we believe in an Almighty Dollar, (2) are secretly in search of the Philosopher's stone, or (3) in league with Mammon. We express the "event as a dollar of something else" so that it becomes cardinal and vastly more interpretable. 

The problem with media is that a lot of the underlying assumptions are not being communicated to the public. Furthermore, a lot of the work is unseen and not easily understood without prior study. Economists should do a better job of explaining themselves so as not to alienate the people they serve or wall themselves of in our ivory towers. 

If Economists were wizards, than we should aspire to be more Gandalf than Saruman. 

Read more here: http://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/20/thank-you-mr-mankiw/