The American Economic Review (AER) is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. Although I would not call it the “best” journal in economics, as you do, it surely holds one of the precious few places at the top (“The Canon of Economics,” February 26, 2011). Thus it is interesting to review, as you do pretty well, its centenary issue that contains twenty best papers ever published in AER according to the panel of six “eminent” economists who trawled through all the issues. And it is very interesting that the most recent entry is Robert Shiller’s 1981 paper about the excessive volatility of stock prices. This paper certainly deserves the attention it has received, but it is quite surprising that no paper published later makes the cut. Or is it? One of the economists on the panel believes that more recent papers are less time-tested. Rather, the omission signals deep trouble in economics itself, which you touch upon only in passing. Much of what has been published in the last thirty years is deeply questionable, to put it mildly, as shown by the failure of the discipline to either foresee the crash of 2008, or to have much to offer on the best way out of it. In fact, economists have only contributed to the crash by subscribing to a view of economic affairs that is ostensibly blind to debilitating crashes. They were supposed to be a thing of the past. Hubris, to put it starkly. Time will surely test the more recent papers from AER, but it is not very likely that they will ever pass the test.