The first chapter of Cities and the Wealth of Nations is titled "Fool's Paradise." Jane Jacobs takes aim at the economic elite and pulls no punches. It starts as follows:

For a little while in the middle of this century it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity. Economists and the rulers they advise had thought up so many ideas for ridding national and international economies of chanciness and disaster, and the ideas had such an air of rationality, predictability and informed statistical analysis, that governments took to supposing they need only muster up a commitment, expertise and money to make economic life do their bidding.

She then proceeds to eviscerate macroeconomic practice as thoroughly as any modern critic of the Federal Reserve. And this in 1984, before the sharp relief brought about by Black Monday, the S&L bailout, the Long Term Capital Management bailout, the bailout of the Mexican peso, the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the subprime crisis and the current period of asset inflation, interest rate suppression and quantitative easing. This was the first Jane Jacobs book I had read. I was astounded.

Why were my liberal, big government friends asking me to read Jane Jacobs?

Macro-economics -- large scale economics -- is the branch of learning entrusted with the theory and practice of understanding and fostering national and international economies. It is a shambles. It's undoing was the good fortune of having been believed in and acted upon in a big way.

We think of the experiments of particle physicists and space explorers as being extraordinarily expensive, and so they are. But the costs are nothing compared with the incomprehensively huge resources that banks, industries, governments and international institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Foundation and the United Nations have poured into tests of macro-economic theory.

Never has a science, or supposed science, been so generously indulged. And never have experiments left in their wakes more wreckage, unpleasant surprises, blasted hopes and confusion, to the point that the question seriously arises whether the wreckage is reparable; if it is, certainly not with more of the same.

Boom. Mic drop.

Of course, she had to endure the critics who felt she was too uneducated, too naive and too....well....female to speak so forcefully on subjects she should know little about. Wikipedia notes that she did not have a college degree and was criticized for being unscholarly and imprecise (read: non academic). Her obituary in the New York Times quotes a Harvard professor as saying that Jacobs has "transparent gaps and blind spots, such as her blasé misunderstandings of theory." That one made me laugh. "Misunderstandings of theory" is a euphemism the elite use in condescension when a more accurate description, especially in Jacobs' case, would be: theories understood and wholly rejected.