ACADEMIC SNARK

I can't recall who said this other than that it was a male graduate of Cambridge University and it was a snark attack on another famous English university: "Oxford has taken up so many lost causes it has become a lost cause."   In the future, we may say something similar about the University Chicago's market fundamentalists.  In addition to freaks like Hayek and Friedman, I especially like this recent idiocy from one of UC's economic professors:

Special Report: Crisis forces "dismal science" to get real
By Sara Ledwith and Antonella Ciancio
LONDON | Tue Jul 3, 2012 2:52am EDT
(Reuters) -

The modern theoretical framework began to emerge in the 1980s by Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Lucas said economic models should be something you could put on a computer and run - "a mechanical artificial world populated by interacting robots." If it wasn't in the model, it couldn't happen. The collapse of the financial system, for example.

Others helped build on this idea.

After the turn of the century, Lucas even suggested economists had cracked one of the profession's biggest questions. "The central problem of depression-prevention has been solved," he wrote in 2003.