One Small Step for Man ... and one giant leap for economists: How we figured out why people walk up staircases but not up escalators. By Steven E. Landsburg ..... It was observed early on that if you stand still on stairs, you'll never get anywhere. But for reasons I can no longer entirely reconstruct, that explanation was dismissed as overly simplistic. Soon the search for a deeper theory was under way.

I gather that apparently economists spend an inordinate amount of time completely stoned to the gills. I mean, what other reason can there be for spending an entire week on why people don't walk up escalators, but do walk up stairways? And not just one person, but an entire department. Doesn't that argue for the mass use of possibly illegal substances?

Either that, or we should be very worried about economics departments in our finer institutions.

And they got it wrong, on top of everything else.

Oh, not the marginal analysis part. No idea on that. Tried to take economics one term. Taught by Torquemada. Math without numbers. (Shudder.) The whole area of study might as well be voodoo. No, the marginal analysis is not the issue.

The issue is that apparently, they've never actually watched people and escalators. People do walk up escalators. In fact, there's an entire etiquette for it; stand on the right side, walk on the left side. (Rigidly observed in Europe, so I'm told, and they get terribly annoyed at Americans because we're a bit more flexible about the whole thing. But I digress.)

Basically, their theory fails because they were too stoned to actually go watch people use escalators.

(Actually, if I understand their theory, what it really means is that there are three levels of marginal analysis and not two. First ... oh, good grief. Now I'm doing it.)

Economic method:
1) Do not observe nature.
2) Devise a theory.
3) Do not test theory.
4) Call it science.