Here's Barry Eichengreen (ht, Irish Economy) severely criticising the theory-bound approach of mainstream economics in a recent op-ed:
What got us into this mess, in other words, were not the limits of scholarly imagination. It was not the failure or inability of economists to model conflicts of interest, incentives to take excessive risk and information problems that can give rise to bubbles, panics and crises. It was not that economists failed to recognize the role of social and psychological factors in decision making or that they lacked the tools needed to draw out the implications. In fact, these observations and others had been imaginatively elaborated by contributors to the literatures on agency theory, information economics and behavioral finance. Rather, the problem was a partial and blinkered reading of that literature. The consumers of economic theory, not surprisingly, tended to pick and choose those elements of that rich literature that best supported their self-serving actions. Equally reprehensibly, the producers of that theory, benefiting in ways both pecuniary and psychic, showed disturbingly little tendency to object. It is in this light that we must understand how it was that the vast majority of the economics profession remained so blissfully silent and indeed unaware of the risk of financial disaster.
And here is Lord Skidelsky, Keynes' biographer, writing on the dominance of the Chicago School of economics and its role in the current economic downturn:
I blame economists more than bankers for the crisis. They established the system of ideas that bankers, politicians, and regulators applied.
And of course, if you've arrived back from a more pleasant place, here's the current ESRI Quarterly Commentary predicting a 17% unemployment rate by the end of this year.