The Christmas glow will come and go. Following on its heels are the blue tinged stretch marks as a result of the excess. January, itself, can be a bit blue too, but usually at the end of the month we can sit back and console ourselves that things can only get better.

This year that is not the case, as we seem to stumble from one unmitigated disaster to the other. One profession more than any other has done more to render itself redundant yet done more than any to make itself indispensable is the Economist.

We have to ask why they were not more in tune with the present downturn. It is said economists have forecasted 9 out of the last 5 recessions. There is a practice among economists that a new curve is named after the first economist to put forward the theory. I can imagine there was hesitancy to put one’s name forward as the harbinger of doom. You may say I am being unfair and that at least two Irish economists were warning of the fragility of the wounded Tiger. This is very true but they have their own agenda.

One returned from the States realising that he was better to attempt to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a sprat in a bigger ocean. He would have been very aware that all was not well in the state of the States. It did not take a huge extrapolation of the figures to realise that if the sub prime market was going to bring down Freddie Mac and Fanny May then there would be reverberations worldwide. He found a ready market for his books, articles and TV programmes.

The other remains relatively untainted by his association with a disgraced financial institution in his native ‘real Capital’. It was with some shock that I read last Sunday that the former Miss Ireland with the big Bewbies was indeed smitten with him. In these times of recession we grab onto every positive, lads there is hope for the rest of us yet so. Interesting to note that the national broadcaster seems less inclined to let his saccharine self-important tones loose on the television screens lately.

For my sins I did study economics, and this is something I rarely admit to in public, but shur who will notice me admitting to it here. I quickly reached the opinion that Economics was the marriage of obscure mathematics and poor cartooning so I would contest that career economists are frustrated mathematicians or lousy cartoonists. The ideal occupation for an unemployed economist would probably be to become a science fiction writer.

There are few economists trundling through the expanding queues in the labour exchanges, mainly because if an economist cannot justify his/her existence to the employer, then the employer is totally up the creek. Economics is built on theorists and curves and models and the occasional truism. Newlan's Truism states that ‘An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job’.

An economist is someone who gets rich explaining to others why they are poor. Even economists view themselves and their peers with some disdain. Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago is quoted as saying ‘when an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite’. In a further step to justify their own existence they have created other specialities within the field. So much further branching has occurred from the original sub divisions of Macroeconomics and Microeconomics, we now even have Econometricians. Econometricians were defined by Peter Kennedy in his book "A Guide to Econometrics" (MIT Press, 1992): (P. 7) [Econometrics is...] the art of drawing a crooked line from an unproved assumption to a foregone conclusion." Now doesn’t that kinda explain why we are where we are right now.

There is the story about the economist's wife who was thinking of leaving him, because all he ever does is stand at the end of the bed and tell her how good things are going to be. "Economic statistics are like a bikini, what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital" – Attributed to Professor Sir Frank Holmes, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, 1967. Economic forecasters assume everything, except responsibility. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly." Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four – give or take ten percent, but on average, four." Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says, "What do you want it to equal?"

I may have a slight dislike for Economists but yet at this present time I am very much of the opinion that our better economic brains should be locked into a room for a few days until they come up with a plan. If they come up with a plan then all we have to do is get the Civil Servants to read it. Then the hope is that one of those Civil Servants might pass on a synopsis of the report to the Minister, after all we cannot expect a mere politician to read a 720 page report.

In this spring of discontent and string vests just remember Mick Jagger and Arnold Schwarzenegger both studied economics and look how they turned out. I will end this piece before I bite my tongue further. These last few hours have brought me to a stronger realisation of the similarity between Economists and Computers – you have to punch information into both of them. An econometrician is a trained professional paid to use computers to guess wrongly about the economy. Looks like we are going to have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps out of this one folks. If there is one thing I dislike more than economists it is the career Civil Servants who have the ears of our Government Ministers. Give them back please; the feckers need them more than ever now!