I had the same thought as Mark Cuban. A PhD in Economics, even winning the Nobel Prize (see my critique of Krugman) doesn't give you the real world feel that starting and running a business does. Economics is full of unintended consequences. Couple of examples, which every start-up person here can appreciate: if you make it very hard to do a lay-off, that leads to businesses becoming extremely cautious in hiring. The minimum wage directly leads to entrepreneurs not taking a chance to hire a less skilled person and train them on the job. These are easy enough to see when you run a business.
It would amaze you how many things that are "common sense" for an entrepreneur are hard for someone sitting in their ivory tower.
This is not just a problem in economics. After I got out of Princeton with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, it amazed me just how orthogonal to the real world much of my adviser's academic work proved to be - I happened to land a job that directly dealt with one of his core areas of research, though I wasn't involved in that area during my PhD myself. My realization led me to write a paper that pointed out that his work was dealing in mathematical models that were not very relevant to the real world, which predictably led to our intellectual parting of ways.
I felt experience working as an engineer should be mandatory for anyone aspiring to be an engineering professor, yet you will find that most engineering faculty have never worked outside of academia.
Not arguing your underlying point, but the examples you chose are poor--all economists are well aware of the effects of a minimum wage, and of barriers to hiring/firing. It's people with no background in economics who don't understand those things.
I would agree if you said "most economists" instead of "all". On the minimum wage, a couple of Princeton economists wrote a scholarly paper pointing out how that didn't suppress hiring (sorry, don't have a handy reference) or increase unemployment. On barriers to hiring/firing, I grant that most economists would agree they are bad.
On the other hand, Krugman himself has been a strong advocate of nationalized health care. Milton Friedman argued how the health care problem is really one of licensing regulations designed to maximize pay for doctors. Imagine an American Software Association that decides how many licenses to grant every year, and you need those credentials to be a hacker. Yes, Friedman addressed the "quack" argument too.
It would amaze you how many things that are "common sense" for an entrepreneur are hard for someone sitting in their ivory tower.
This is not just a problem in economics. After I got out of Princeton with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, it amazed me just how orthogonal to the real world much of my adviser's academic work proved to be - I happened to land a job that directly dealt with one of his core areas of research, though I wasn't involved in that area during my PhD myself. My realization led me to write a paper that pointed out that his work was dealing in mathematical models that were not very relevant to the real world, which predictably led to our intellectual parting of ways.
I felt experience working as an engineer should be mandatory for anyone aspiring to be an engineering professor, yet you will find that most engineering faculty have never worked outside of academia.