Prophet of Boom (and Bust)

He compares the current mistaken focus on bailouts � from Wall Street to the auto industry � to the early mistakes of another president faced with economic disaster: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose initial rejection of the revolutionary concepts of John Maynard Keynes helped prolong the worldwide economic misery of the late 1920s and 1930s.
It may take another heretic to pull America out of its current downhill slide this time around.

�Ravi is a phenomenon � the best predictive record of any economist, past or present � and he does it all by reference to recorded, empirical facts, not paradigm [or] ideology,� said Prof. Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, a visiting scholar at Harvard University who specializes in political economy and social anthropology.
His supporters think Batra should long ago have won a Nobel Prize and that President-elect Barack Obama ought to be calling him with offers of cabinet posts or at least asking for his advice.
But instead, despite his sterling record and best-selling books, Batra remains somewhat isolated in the economics field, the result of one bad call and, more to the point, an economic theory that flies in the face of today�s accepted wisdom � in the face, that is, of the theories and practices that got us in the horrendous spot we�re in today.

�We are on the verge of a social revolution � it�s already started [with Obama�s election]. The second part, where the theories are discarded and new ideas take over and new reforms take over � that part has yet to occur, and that will take a few years,� he predicted. �After that occurs, the age of acquisitors will be over, and there will be a new age with a totally different attitude toward taxation and the economic system.�

The revolution, which he believes could happen in a couple of years or sometime soon after that, should bring in a new chapter of greater economic equality and less poverty and suffering � first in the U.S., then rippling out to the rest of the world, he thinks.
�The U.S. has never been in any other age other than the age of acquisitors. So this will be a new experience for the U.S.,� he said.