Assault of Thoughts - 10/5/2010

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

- Robert Waldman notes some insightful stuff that Keynes had to say about what would come to be called the Phillip's Curve. Scott Sumner notes some uninsightful stuff that Keynes had to say about wage rigidities. The funny thing is, both of these points demonstrate that Keynes did not think the things that are attributed to him in the crude Keynesian narrative that a lot of people try to pin on him.

- My work on black and white youths' success in connecting to the labor market got cited on Huffington Post. The author called me a "scholar", though, so I have to steeply discount the reliability of everything else he had to say :) Seriously, though - it's a good read. He just cited a short brief that Marla and I wrote, but we have a longer article on this research in the works.

- An interesting article in The New Yorker on the economics of procrastination, featuring the thinking of Nobel laureate George Akerlof. The key, of course, is in the way we discount the future.

- Jonathan Catalan suggests it may be time for a new major Austrian treatise. One of the interesting goals Jonathan has in mind is reaching non-Austrian economists, arguing that one of the obstacles is that non-Austrians don't have a broader context with which to engage the Austrian school. Is that a reasonable goal? I don't know. I personally think there are other reasons the Austrians haven't been more widely accepted, but then again that's exactly what I would say if I didn't have all the context I needed to see the light, isn't it? I'd prefer Austrians work on specific issues that show promise and figure out where those issues can teach and learn from other economists. "Schools of thought" are interesting insofar as they occur naturally from the coalescence of similar ideas, but I don't think it's a good idea to strictly hew to them and try to win people over in a science. If a particular collection of ideas identified as a "school of thought" is useful for answering a specific question, great. But I see little intrinsic value in it.

- And Arnold Kling differentiates his views from ABCT.