Prad Krulong on Keynesian Political Economy

In the storied tradition of combining celebrity names, Arnold Kling has coined "Prad Krulong" - a combination of Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman - in a (rather unsatisfying) discussion of some recent thoughts from the two luminaries on macroeconomics. I really think that what they're getting at is much bigger than macroeconomics, though - it is Keynesian political economy: not just the economics of the current downturn, but the political economy of why the response has been so tepid:

- At Project Syndicate, Brad DeLong starts by writing about the retreat of macroeconomic policy. What he presents is really what I would call Keynesian political economy or Keynesian public choice theory - he explains why we let economic disasters happen when we should know better. This has been a theme for DeLong for a long time, and he says it quite explicitly here.

- That column got the juices going for Paul Krugman who responded with a piece on the "instability of moderation". He goes through three types of instability: "intellectual instability", whereby good ideas don't survive in the academy, "political instability", whereby political institutions can never be depended on to properly implement what we know to be true, and "financial instability" of the typical Minsky variety.

- Brad DeLong comes back with a post at Foreign Policy called The Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse, straining to tie together Hayek, Schumpeter, Mellon, and Nietzsche (yes, Nietzsche) to explain the political revolt against Keynesianism. I wouldn't fully embrace this piece for the same reasons that I've noted in the past that I don't entirely agree with Krugman and DeLong's position on Hayek and the depression. Despite the fact that I don't entirely agree with them, I do have to press flustered Austrians on the point a little bit. Krugman and DeLong certainly overstate the peace that Hayek made with the depression. But how exactly would you characterize Hayek's reaction? Did he not think it was "necessary"? Did he not think it was "functional"? The fact is he did. Krugman and DeLong probably hurt their own argument by overstating Hayek's position, but I don't think they should back down from the fact that Hayek's was a fundamentally myopic perspective. I was tempted to add "unsympathizing", but honestly I can't know the man's heart. But there should be no arguing over the fact that he thought depressionary unemployment was functional and provided a (in my opinion, inadequate) theoretical justification for that position, while Keynes thought depressionary unemployment was dysfunctional and provided a (in my opinion, much better) theoretical justification for his position (you an argue over my parentheticals, but not the primary point).