I need to write today. If I post, yell at me in the comments.

Good news on some other fronts: got proofs back from Notes and Records of the Royal Society. That will be coming out in March. Plus I am off to the copy-editors for a brief from earlier this fall at the Urban Institute on black male joblessness in the recession. Not sure when that will be out but it's on its way.

But before I jump into writing, I want to share two good posts from Jonathan. First, he defends Keynes on the paradox of thrift, at least insofar as he claims that he is not as simple-minded as many people think. There's a word for people who say that Keynes was against saving: "wrong". Then he defends Hayek against people who think he is unclear. I generally agree with this. I do have to work a little harder to understand Hayek's point sometimes (relative to, say, Keynes), but that's really on me not Hayek. I feel like I'm more in Keynes's head. I would to a certain extent defend the "Hayek is unclear" line on a lot of the more political work and things like Road to Serfdom. Honsetly it can read like Hayek is an alarmist with very dire slippery slope warnings one minute and not the next, and I'll be damned if Hayekians have offered me a consistent explanation of what the argument is. Part of the reason why Hayek inspires this confusion, of course, is that he left a longer paper trail than Keynes did. There is some difference between earlier and later Keynes (although I think it's overstated), but the thing is most people don't read the early Keynes so when we talk about him we're mainly talking about one book and a smattering of other writings in the time period of that book. With Hayek you have a lot more said that spans many decades. Even then I think for the most part Hayek is clear (albeit not always right).