1 “Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” — John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform “‘Very Serious People’ … the way respectable opinion keeps demanding utterly foolish policies … someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence.” — Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, The New York Times “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked This is a polemic about Very Serious People in real estate. Money managers and brokerage firms, managed by Very Serious People, invest in real estate research; some even do so heavily. But too often the research is little more than propa