"When the U.K. Tried Economists for Spreading 'Mental Fog'"

From Bloomberg Echoes:

In June 1933, William Beveridge, the director of the London School of Economics, organized a mock trial of economists to benefit the King Edward’s Hospital Fund.

With the world mired in the Great Depression, the seriocomic proceedings illuminated a fierce and deepening public anxiety over the role economists had played in shaping government policy.

"There was never a time when the advice of the economic expert was so often asked and so seldom followed," the Economist magazine wrote.

Four prominent academics, including Beveridge, were charged with "conspiracy to spread mental fog." Minister of Agriculture Walter Elliot presided, and Robert Boothby, a member of Parliament, led the prosecution.

While three of them pleaded "not guilty," Beveridge instead passed a note to the judge that said he had "absent-mindedly left his voice somewhere in the building, probably in the library." Once it was retrieved, he said, he was "not guilty, but not so guilty as the others."

The prosecutor presented his argument:

The case that I have to bring before you today is no ordinary case. ... The men before you are not ordinary men; they are economists. ... And as Walter Bagehot said long ago, "No one is ever really sorry when an economist dies."

The charge I shall bring before you today is that of a concerted, deliberate and malicious attempt to wreck the government of our country by confusing, by fustigating, by reducing to pulp the minds of its rulers.

Boothby indicted the economists for being "unintelligible." Worse, he said, they had been proven wrong, disagreed among themselves and changed their arguments. He particularly attacked "the gang which calls itself J.M. Keynes" for its contradictory opinions, which he said had nearly driven the minister of agriculture mad....MORE