The financial meltdown has inspired lashings out at economists by professors in other disciplines. A classic example: a posting on The MIT PressLog by Trevor Pinch, a sociologist at Cornell and author of "Living in a Material World: Sociology and Technology Studies." Economists, Pinch points out, did a dreadful job of anticipating the current crisis -- just as, seventy years ago, they failed to foresee the length and depth of the Great Depression. And yet "aren't economists revered, the people we turn to and depend on for economic policy, and don't we award them a Nobel prize every year?" That's what burns, you see. It's not just that economists get the world wrong -- in theory and in practice -- but that they view themselves as superior to their sister social-science disciplines ...