Economists in the city.

Summary Opinion polls regularly show a strong interest in economic issues among the general public. However, economists are sometimes viewed with a certain amount of mistrust. This mistrust is fed by their failings: inability to foresee the 2008 financial crisis, conflicts of interest that are not always revealed, difficulty in reaching agreement or, conversely, a tendency to think in the same way, and a lack of pedagogical sense. The dialogue between economists and public opinion or the world of public decision making is made even more difficult by the specificities of the discipline, notably the uncertainty about its results and the participation of economists in the society they claim to decipher independently.