New Science Is Born

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is announcing a new addition to the Registry of Recognized Scientific Disciplines. Called First-Response Economics, its practitioners are, in the words of the official definition, “the first on the scene when the science or pseudo science of another conservative economist goes up in flames.”

Said Dr. Winfried Davis from the AAAS, “These so-called reactional economists, as opposed to the reactionary economists whose botched science they pseudo scientifically explain away, have been proliferating in the economics departments of the nation’s top universities.

“Of course the most notable examples these days of this uncommonly well funded new breed of economist, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff from Harvard, also wear the hat of the standard reactionary economist whose shoddy and self-serving and ideologically compromised science has created the abhorrent void nature has filled with this new scientific field.

“Coming to their own rescue in the aftermath of the recent scientific train wreck we’ve all been reading about, these so-called highly regarded economists are redeeming themselves by painstakingly making the scientific case that the anti-austerity conclusions their science would have reached had they conducted it with even a modicum of accuracy and integrity are all beside the point in light of exciting new discoveries in the area of gut feelings and also owing to new state-of-the-art scientific techniques like factoring the immorality of debt into the equation and making a nation exactly equal to a single-family household in all the algorithms.”

Said Vincent Reinhart, husband of Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and resident economics scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, “The science of First-Response Economics could not have blossomed at a better time.

“This UMass schoolboy who’s been harassing my wife and Ken [Rogoff] is now doing hit jobs on the foundational science of all the best and brightest free-market economists in the country. He’s even calling into question the findings of the seminal paper that gave birth to modern-day supply-side economics.”

The UMass graduate student in question, Thomas Herndon, appears to now have proof that the bedrock conservative economic principle that money trickles down is actually the byproduct of shabby scientific work.

Said Mr. Herndon, “Had one of the founding fathers of Reaganomics, a hydrological economist from Chicago, not forgotten to carry the one on a relatively simple addition problem, the flow of money in the highly influential trickle-down formulation would not have been designated a trickle but a class 4 flood.

“Unfortunately for the 99%, though, at the same time this mistake was being made, the graduate exchange student from Germany in charge of typing up the paper in question, the so-called economic gospel according to Ronald, chose the word ‘down’ instead of the more precise word ‘south’ for the axiom for which this gospel has come to be known.

“So the scientific reality is that money doesn’t trickle, or flood, down—it floods south, as in toward the Cayman Islands and Barbados and the Bahamas. The science was right all along, but due to human error and other factors the economic world keeps getting spun in the diametrically opposite direction of what it naturally should be spinning in.”

Said Carmen Reinhart’s husband Vincent Reinhart, former George W. Bush economic advisor now with Morgan Stanley, “Gosh, I really hope this Herndon kid doesn’t get himself trampled too badly when our economic first responders arrive and start madly applying the basic scientific law of what goes around comes around to make it perfectly clear that whatever goes south in a 'global' economy inevitably winds up north of the original north relative to the original south, so the flooding money all of a sudden can be said to be heading again in the direction of those in the down position back when the money was said to trickle down.”