The Cult of Blaming the "Economy"

Certain, certitude: If you had asked the entire world before the era of Copernicus: "Did the sun rise today? Did it set?" Everybody would have answered you: "We're absolutely certain of it!" They were certain, and they were mistaken. —Dictionnaire philosophique

One of the puzzling things about human nature is the constant "reframing" of new facts into their pre-existing beliefs. I recall the believe-it-or-not story of a cult whose leader predicted the world would end on Jan 1, 19**, due to the sins of humanity and the wrath of Gawd. On January 2, however, there was no apocalypse. One would think the cult would be ashamed or abashed due to their false apocalyptic prediction, but alas! They were as happy as an academic grossing six figures during a 12-month "sabbatical" in Provence. When asked about their false prediction, the cult members gladly explained that their prediction was true at the time, but Gawd felt merciful after hearing their prayers and so gave Earth a reprieve. Hallelujah! Their faith was strengthened as they felt saved by their own prayers from their own prediction! 

People act like those cultists when they try to dress new evidence into old clothes, no matter what the fit. The journalists writing about the scam keep referencing "the economy" to explain declining job prospects of law grads. As we know, the opposite is true: the problem is  "Structural, not cyclical". Yet even the best weapon against any scam, media exposure, continues to name-drop "the economy" in every article. It is as if the human instinct is to grab for the safe, feel-good-no-cognitive-dissonance-here explanation of things. It is like blaming the weather for being rained upon instead of the guy who sold you a broken umbrella.

It goes thus:

Pre-existing Belief (Myth): Law School is awesome, and nondischargable-until-death student-loan taxpayer-funded-yet-unregulated-tuition payments-the-cost-of-a-medium-sized-house are awesome too.

New Facts (Reality): No jobs for half the graduates, and declining careers for the other half, getting worse year after year.

Self-serving Reframing (Cult/Nutter view):Well, I could not possibly be wrong about how awesome Law Skooll is, so it must be the economy, stupid! So no one is at fault, because lawyers do not control the overall economy, and things will turn around again, even if we do nothing. We win! No anxiety or guilt here! It feels good to be irrational.

Honest Interpretation (Mature Adult view): Well, I probably was wrong: law school must not be working if it graduates twice the number that the market demands. [Researches further] Maybe Law Schools are structured inefficiently and run for the benefit of the academic owners instead of the overall legal profession, the students, and society? Are false job placement promises turning good students into debt slaves? It's not the economy, stupid, it's the system itself! It's a scam!

And there we have it—the cultish self-serving "reframers" who keep repeating and blaming the "economy" confuse cause with effect. There lies their error, and with it dies their claim to "lawyerly reasoning". The economy is merely the state of demand for legal services. The economy doesn't cause legal unemployment—too many law schools do.

Note: And too many seats in those schools as well, since each school has no motivation to limit their enrollment, so long as it doesn't hurt their ranking. Georgetown University Law "Center" alone every three years spits almost 3,000 lawyers onto the dead-in-the-water DC legal market! (Counting both JD's & LLM's) Talk about selling overpriced badly-seasoned sausage to farmers at a pig farm in Germany during the slaughtering season: See also, "Not surprisingly, DC ranks as the most densely concentrated population of lawyers having 1,356% more lawyers per capita than New York."

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Read my book-length satire/exposé of law school, Smarter Than Socrates: The End of the Law School Era.