A few related blog posts in close temporal proximity suggests a disturbance in the force. Chris Dillow writes that:

"It's become a cliche to bemoan the fact that politicians are disproportionately Oxford PPEists. This is odd, as there's not much evidence that they read much E."

I might add that PPEists like Rhodes Scholar Tony Abbott don't appear to have wasted their time bothering with the P or the P either, but I'll let that go for the moment. Dillow lists "seven basic principles of economics" that Abbott, Cameron & co. missed out on, in between swotting for their Applied Sadism exams and slippering Ed Milliband. In a similar vein, Simon Wren-Lewis notes that outside the quite mainstream, indeed positively conservative, consensus that austerity in a recession/depression is madness, lies a substantial body of opinion which holds that those inappropriately fixated on the real world "have lost the political debate". To help make sense of this claim, one of Simon's readers suggests that:

'[…] the next time you read or hear the words "won the political argument" replace them with "dominates elite discourse" and see if that makes more sense.'

Another mainstream economist who recklessly insists on changing his opinion to fit observed reality rather than vice versa, Robert Skidelsky, has abandoned his former position that "the confidence fairy" has any significant effect on the real economy:

"The confidence factor affects government decision-making, but it does not affect the results of decisions. Except in extreme cases, confidence cannot cause a bad policy to have good results, and a lack of it cannot cause a good policy to have bad results, any more than jumping out of a window in the mistaken belief that humans can fly can offset the effect of gravity."

So, well…