Assault of Thoughts - 7/10/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- First and foremost, happy birthday to my lovely wife, who I don't think reads this blog but might drop by from time to time.

- Perhaps Ed Prescott's Nobel Prize should be revoked... this goes beyond "gee - regime uncertainty is important" (indeed it is). This is blind dogmatism masquerading as economic analysis. We have enough of that as it is.

- Economic Thought continues to put out good stuff. Mattheus has a very interesting looking post that I've only gotten a chance to skim rather than look at in detail, covering the significance of the synthetic a priori for economics. I'm going to revisit that more thoroughly and you should too. Jonathan has a nice, fair, nuanced review of this ongoing discussion of all economics being a footnote to "Keynes vs. Hayek".

- And on Keynes vs. Hayek, Krugman comes belatedly to the 1932 letters that Mario Rizzo has been circulating. He's characteristically more blunt where I probably should have been initially. I usually have the approach of "Hayek had some incredibly important things to say that people can't just dismiss, and Keynes was really right on X, Y, and Z, and you're wrong to say he wasn't". What I should make more of a point of adding is "diagnostically, I think Hayek was simply wrong on the Depression, despite all the other fantastic insights he had". Krugman does the job for me.

- Come on - nobody likes a poseur. Certainly not one that critiques such low-hanging fruit as "authoritarians".

- It's hard to beat Brad DeLong when it comes to blogging the history of economic thought. This is a post on Karl Marx's real business cycle connections. This reminds me of another point I wanted to make about Garrison's book. Garrison dismisses virtually all non-Austrian 20th century economics, and he frames monetarism, New Classicism, and real business cycle theory as natural evolutions of Keynesian theory. The assertion is absurd. New Classicism was a response to Keynesianism perhaps, but it was a fundamentally classical rejection of Keynes's rejection of classicism. The idea that it was part of what Garrison calls the "Keynesian spur" is beyond ridiculous. It was a rejection of Keynes, not a continuation of him. Garrison's framing of the issue is bassackwards.

- Mark Thoma cautions against expecting miracles from monetary policy.

700 some items on the blog-roll waiting for me when I came home distilled to this list of gems. Not bad, Daniel. Not bad. Not even looking at anything Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias posted over the course of the week helped a lot.