Assault of Thoughts - 1/8/2012

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

- A record decline in government jobs under Obama (that's record percentage point decline, not just levels). I tell ya - Obama does a pretty crappy job at this socialism thing.

- Peter Klein complains about Yglesias on the Austrian school and economic journalism in general. I especially liked this: "I once heard a lecture by the sociologist Steven Goldberg about his work on male social dominance, expressed in his books The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1974) and Why Men Rule (1993). I remember him saying that whenever he presents his dominance thesis, someone invariably raises the objection, with a smug and self-satisfied expression, “What about Indira Gandhi?” or “What about Margaret Thatcher?” He went on (I’m paraphrasing): “Right. . . . Like I’m going to devote three years of my life to researching and writing a book called The Inevitability of Patriarchy, and someone’s going to say ‘What about Indira Gandhi,’ and I’m going to slap my forehead and say, ‘Oh, crap, why I didn’t think of that!’” Goldberg was a funny guy, with a great Brooklyn accent too. (His books point out that Gandhi-led India and Thatcher-led Britain were male-dominated societies, particularly in matters of state.)." Now that reminded me of a bunch of people on Keynesianism, but I won't name names here. I have a comment that does defend one grain of truth in Matt's post - about how Austrians moved away from their business cycle theories as the depression wore on. I imagine this is a reference to the move towards Haberler's explanations and therefore is not all that incorrect. Plus how many freaking times do we have to hear that Hayek apparently liked NGDP targeting - and yet now Yglesias is wrong to say that his position changed? Anyway - the rest of Yglesias is fairly bad, but there's a grain of truth there.

- Harry Holzer of Georgetown University (formerly of the Urban Institute) has an article on skills an a competitive grant program for job training in the new Issues in Science and Technology. And in a previous issues Diane Auer Jones has an article on apprenticeships.