J.M.Keynes on Classical Economics

One cannot read the following excerpt from Keynes without being impressed and disturbed by the fact that the same reasons were and are being set forth in support of neo-classical economics even after their complete and utter failure to predict, explain or provide solutions for the current crisis.

The completeness of the Ricardian victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpaltable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted it to the support of the dominant social forces behind authority.
But although the doctrine itself has remained unquestioned by orthodox economists up to a late date, its signal failure for purposes of scientific prediction has greatly impaired, in the course of time, the prestige of its practitioners. For professional economists...were apparently unmoved by the lack of correspondence between the results of their theory and the facts of observation;-a discrepancy which the ordinary man has not failed to observe, with the result of his growing unwillingness to accord economists that measure of respect which he gives to other groups of scientists whose theoretical results are confirmed by observation when they are applied to the facts.

John Maynard Keynes (1936)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 3