A profile of the Berkeley economist Raj Chetty in The American includes this unfortunate passage, which has to be amusing to non-economists (via Tyler Cowen):

In a study entitled “Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences,” published this year in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Chetty and Berkeley colleague Adam Szeidl contest the popular belief among economists that unemployment insurance is too generous. George Akerlof, who also teaches at Berkeley and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, describes Chetty’s insight in the study as revolutionary. “He had a new way of looking at the problems of the unemployed,” Akerlof says. “Raj emphasized that they find it very difficult to meet their prior commitments. For example, they must pay their rent or their mortgage, and these commitments very much add to the difficulties of being unemployed. Economists were just not thinking of that until Raj came up with it. This is a very big innovation in the theory of unemployment.”

Economists didn’t realize it was hard for unemployed people to pay their housing costs? It sounds bizarre, but constructing mathematical models without actually, say, talking to unemployed people can lead to crude and incomplete theories.