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oh no what will we do without price theory (possibly the worst course I ever took, in retrospect)
Oh my god this article is a amazing—a treasure trove for me to be citing and screenshotting for years to come.
He decries economics becoming more susceptible to political influence. Hm I wonder what he does, by contrast
He decries economics becoming more susceptible to political influence. Hm I wonder what he does, by contrast
The kind of thinking that eschews politics in order to conclude that rent control is bad.
Price theory does not, in fact, help us make sense of this question, as we know now since it was instrumental in destroying antitrust enforcement based on exactly the claim that concentration=competition, predictably causing today’s corporate power problem.
And, ah yes, the inevitable false intellectual history of institutionalism. The reason they’re no longer around is because of the Red Scare, and they did in fact come up with many things that lasted, social security, unemployment insurance, and antitrust enforcement among them.
Which is, of course, why this guy and his intellectual predecessors went to war against them, by claiming they were unscientific because of their reliance on data. They’re trying to run the exact same play now, with pieces like this.
Anyway, here’s the link to this god-awful piece.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-economics-lost-itself-in-data-11611775849
h/t @D_Kuehn, who I gather was decrying Krugman’s making fun of this piece. I would simply note that Krugmans & its author have both propounded the same false intellectual history of institutionalism.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-economics-lost-itself-in-data-11611775849
h/t @D_Kuehn, who I gather was decrying Krugman’s making fun of this piece. I would simply note that Krugmans & its author have both propounded the same false intellectual history of institutionalism.
I would also point out that the reason ideologically opposed contemporary economists insist on this false history is that they need institutionalism to have been a dead end, in order to conceive what’s happened since as an upward march of science, since that exculpates everyone.
The fact that their own disciplinary colleagues embarked on a multi-decade campaign to destroy knowledge and set our understanding of the economy back to the 19th century in order to dismantle the New Deal doesn’t make the postwar field look good, to say the least.
