Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults (UCSB, 2003)

In 2003 Munger gave UCSB a working diagnosis of what is wrong with academic economics. He starts generously — economics is more multidisciplinary than the other soft sciences, so it should be admired — and then lists its failings one after another: fatal disconnectedness from the other disciplines, “physics envy” and a craving for false precision, an overemphasis on macro at the expense of micro, no habit of crediting borrowed ideas, and a near-total refusal to integrate psychology. Underneath it all is his long-running rejection of the strong efficient-market hypothesis, which Berkshire’s own record contradicts.

A note on the recording. A video of this lecture once circulated, but the link that aggregators pointed to is now dead, and we have not been able to confirm any surviving authentic public video. We therefore mark this contested — the talk is genuine and well documented in text, but the audio/video status is unresolved — and link a verified transcript instead of embedding a clip we can’t stand behind.

The transcript linked here is Farnam Street’s full text of the lecture. For the framework that this talk applies to economics specifically, see the 1998 Harvard Law talk on multidisciplinary skills.

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