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Bruce Caldwell on The Road from Mont Pèlerin

| Peter Klein |

Don’t miss Bruce Caldwell’s review of Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard, 2009). “Mont Pèlerin” refers, of course, to the Mont Pèlerin Society, the association of classical liberal academics and journalists founded by Hayek in 1947. Bruce finds the volume informative, despite its frequently disdainful tone toward its subjects. He also raises an important general point, one that I’ve wrestled with a lot since the financial crisis: does anybody listen to us?

The second question [raised by the book] has to do with the potency of intellectuals to shape world events or, more narrowly, even economic and social policy. It is evident that members of the Mont Pèlerin Society, for all of their diversity, still preferred some form of liberalism . . . to other ways of organizing economic and political affairs. But how important were they in the emerging global consensus that began in the 1980s in favor of trade liberalization and privatization? Were not, for example, the dismal performance of Keynesian demand management policies in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere in the 1970s; the heavy-handed actions of the trade unions in Britain during the “Winter of Discontent”; the sclerotic performance of countries like India who had embraced a modified version of the planning model for their own; and, of course, the patent economic and political failures of the East Bloc, far more important in turning the tide, however briefly, towards globalization? Was not George Stigler (himself a founding member of the Society) right in his comment about economists that “our influence appears to be powerful only when we support policies ripe for adoption” (Stigler 1987, p. 11)?

Add comment 2 September 2010

Chris Freeman, 1921-2010

| Nicolai Foss |

Chris Freeman, author of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, co-founder of Research Policy, and founder and first director of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, died yesterday. Freeman was not only an academic entrepreneur, but also an important mentor for innovation scholars like Giovanni Dosi, Keith Pavitt, and Jan Fagerberg.

1 comment 17 August 2010

Foss and Klein Critique of Kirzner

| Peter Klein |

The Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of Private Enterprise contains a Kirzner symposium, including a paper by Nicolai and me, “Alertness, Action, and the Antecedents of Entrepreneurship.” We critique Kirzner’s concept of the “pure entrepreneur,” arguing that alertness is a historically contingent attribute of real-world business people — what Mises calls “promoters” — but not essential to the entrepreneurial function itself. We also suggest that Kirzner is inconsistent on the issue of antecedents, simultaneously holding that the entrepreneur-as-discoverer exists outside any particular institutional environment, and that certain public policies inhibit entrepreneurial discovery by blocking profit opportunities. Some of the material in the paper is familiar to readers of our other works, but our critique of the Kirznerian pure entrepreneur, in the context of ideal types, goes beyond previous arguments.

Oh, some of you may be more interested in the rest of the special issue, which leads with Dan Klein and Jason Briggeman’s broadside, “Israel Kirzner on Coordination and Discovery,” followed by a lengthy response from Kirzner himself. (Our paper is really an addendum.) Pete Boettke and Dan D’Amico, Steve Horwitz, Gene Callahan, Bob Murphy, and Martin Ricketts round out the Kirzner symposium.

2 comments 28 July 2010

Misc Academic Links

| Peter Klein |

Academia’s love-hate relationship with wikis.
Deathbed witticisms from Voltaire, Hegel, and other interesting persons.
Should research universities exploit the internal division of labor?
Tips on academic job talks from Fabio’s valuable series.

2 comments 19 July 2010

Hayek Interviews

| Peter Klein |

In 1983 the Earhart Foundation sponsored a lengthy set of interviews with F. A. Hayek in Los Angeles. The transcripts have long been available (and form the basis of the interview parts of Hayek on Hayek), but the complete set of videos has just now been put online, courtesy of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. The interviewers are an impressive lot as well: James Buchanan, Armen Alchian, Axel Leijonhufvud, Robert Bork, Tom Hazlett, Jack High, Bob Chitester, Leo Rosten, and Earlene Craver. (I hardly recognized the youthful Hazlett!) You can also get the transcripts, if you prefer plain text.

2 comments 14 July 2010

The History of Nikola Tesla

| Peter Klein |

Saturday was Nikola Tesla’s birthday. Here’s Jeremiah Warren’s video in Tesla’s honor:

Tesla was, of course, the great inventor whose technical achievements outshone those of his great rival, Thomas Edison, but who was unable to commercialize any of his discoveries. Tesla, unfortunately, put his faith in intellectual property-rights protection, while Edison emphasized management and marketing. As Danny Quah puts it, “Public relations and entrepreneurial savvy trump the raw intellectual idea.”

1 comment 12 July 2010

In the Pink

| Dick Langlois |

A propos Peter’s recent post about behavioral economics, I discovered this interesting video illustrating Daniel Pink’s book Drive (thanks, Steve). I don’t think there is anything about it that is particularly inconsistent with what we know about the economics of organization, but others may disagree.

I once heard Pink speak, at the 2002 Business History Conference meeting, just after his book Free Agent Nation (about the rise of self-employment) appeared. He was one third of a panel on the New Economy, the rest of which consisted of two extremely far-left twits. It was amusing to hear Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, gamely hold up a sensible position, though I remember thinking what greater fun it would have been if they had invited Virginia Postrel.

Add comment 13 June 2010

Taking AIM

| Dick Langlois |

Aha! So that’s why nobody met me at the airport: I was supposed to be in France. Actually, I’m in the UK, traveling around as a Visiting Fellow of the Academy of Advanced International Management (AIM). I will be giving a series of talks under their aegis in Lancaster, London, and Edinburgh. I am now in Lancaster, where my host is Martin Spring, an operations management guy who is interested in modularity and contracting in the delivery of complex services like engineering. My first stop in the UK was Nottingham, where I refrained from any tax protests let alone progressive redistribution of rents. (This despite the ads for the new Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe movie prominently displayed on all the busses.) But I did speak at the Nottingham University Business School, which is home to the likes of Paul Windrum and Peter Swann.

Today I hope to see some of Lancaster, possibly including Williamson Park. Among its highly specific assets is the pictured Ashton Memorial, built by James Williamson, Jr., Lord Ashton, who made his fortune in the linoleum trade. (According to the city council website, he was able to afford this grand edifice because he paid his workers so little.)

During the trip I also plan to stop in at several conferences, including DRUID (for one day), the ISNIE conference in Stirling (where I am likely to view a flesh-and-blood Williamson), and the Schumpeter Society in Aalborg. If I can, and if the material warrants, I may try a little live (or at least half-dead) blogging from the conferences.

Add comment 12 June 2010

Jane Jacobs Festschrift

| Peter Klein |

It’s called What We See and has just been published by New Village Press. Here are the publisher and Amazon links. The website, whatwesee.org, has a blog and lots of useful information about the book, the authors, and Jacobs.

Of particular interest to O&Mers include “Rethinking ‘Jacobs Spillovers,’ or How Diverse Cities Actually Make Individuals More Creative and Economically Successful” by Pierre Desrochers and Samuli Leppälä and “The Mirage of the Efficient City” by Sandy Ikeda.

Add comment 8 June 2010

Buridan’s Ass

| Peter Klein |

This week’s A.Word.A.Day features “Words not named after the person they should be,” including McKenzie, orrery, philippic, and guillotine. Thursday’s entry, on Buridan’s ass, reminded me of Murray Rothbard’s insightful discussion of Buridan. Rothbard treats Buridan as an important contributor to the theory of value, price, and exchange, particularly the theory of money. Buridan’s ass makes the daily word list because a) the famous example of an animal who, indifferent between two equidistant bales of hay, can choose neither and hence starves to death, did not originate with Buridan, who merely commented on a familiar story, and b) Buridan referred to a dog, not a donkey — it was Buridan’s critics who changed the animal in the story to an ass, as an insult.

3 comments 4 June 2010

Manne on Fama and French

| Peter Klein |

An open letter to Gene Fama and Ken French from Henry Manne (also running today at Truth on the Market):

Dear Gene and Ken:

I must say that I was totally flabbergasted when I read your recent blog posting on insider trading. I know that your usual posts on investments, which I often cite to friends, are well-informed and empirically supported; your work over the years on these topics is important and influential — and rightly so. Unfortunately, in this post, you have deviated from your usual high quality. Anyone current on the topic of insider trading will recognize that you have been careless in your selection of anti-insider-trading arguments and that you omitted from your brief note the major part of the argument about insider trading: whether and how much it contributes to market efficiency. To say this is a strange omission coming from Fama and French would be an understatement.

Your first error is to assume that the insider trading debate is about informed trading only by “top management.” I suspect that this error may flow from my original argument for using insider trading to compensate for entrepreneurial services in a publicly held company, a matter you do not mention and which I will not pursue here except to note that “entrepreneurial services” does not equate to top management. Strangely no one seems to notice that most of the celebrated cases on the subject have not involved corporate personnel at all (a printer, a financial analyst, a lawyer, and Martha Stewart). (more…)

Add comment 17 May 2010

Readings for Hayek-Klein Day

| Peter Klein |

Here are some readings to help you celebrate tomorrow’s Hayek-Klein Day:

8 comments 7 May 2010

Esther Duflo Wins Clark Medal

| Peter Klein |

Congratulations to MIT’s Esther Duflo for winning the John Bates Clark Medal. (NB: Unlike Richard T. Ely, J. B. Clark was actually a great economist.) Duflo is a pioneer in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which, along with natural experiments, is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to conventional regression models. Interestingly, the WSJ reports that Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan, another RCT person, was also on the short list. Given the extreme faddishness of social scientists we can expect a wave of RCT centers, experiments, and papers in the next few years.

3 comments 23 April 2010

Melnyk on Flew

| Peter Klein |

My Missouri colleague Andrew Melnyk penned this nice appreciation of Antony Flew, who passed away 8 April 2010. Flew “was for several decades a heroic defender of classically liberal political philosophy and indeed by far the best known professional philosopher in Britain over that period to champion classical liberalism.” As Andrew notes, “in challenging the spirit of the age as sharply and as unapologetically as he did, he was, and must have known that he was, irreparably damaging his reputation among his overwhelmingly left-leaning professional peers.”

Here are remarks on Flew’s political philosophy from David Gordon, David Conway, and Sean Gabb. Here’s a biographical sketch written for Flew’s 2001 Schlaurbaum Prize, and here’s the acceptance speech.

1 comment 20 April 2010

C. K. Prahalad (1941-2010)

| Peter Klein |

C. K. Prahalad died Friday at the age of 68. He’s best known for his “guru” work with Gary Hamel, but had turned his attention more recently to economic development , particularly the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” approach to poverty reduction. Here are thoughts and reminiscences from the WSJ, HBR, Ross Emmett, and the Ross School. HBR has already set up a Prahalad page. Here are previous O&M mentions. I last saw him at the 2009 SMS conference in Washington, D.C. where he spoke with Yves Doz on “The Future of Strategy.”

2 comments 19 April 2010

Edgerati

| Dick Langlois |

I just received an email from John Hagel informing me that I am among the inaugural class of what he and John Seeley Brown call the Edgerati. According the website, “Edgerati are people who venture out onto various edges, engage with participants on those edges, develop deep insight from their involvement on the edge and report back to the rest of the world what they have learned.” I’m glad to learn that what I had always thought to be the fringe or the margin is actually the edge. (Actually, I’m genuinely flattered.) Among the other Edgerati is one Nicolai Foss.

2 comments 9 April 2010

Mundaneum: The Google of 1910

| Peter Klein |

Fascinating article by Molly Springfield in Triple Canopy on the Mundaneum, an effort by two Belgian lawyers to collect and classify all the world’s information, using notecards and an innovative filing system. Information scientist Paul Otlet “was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast ‘web,’ connected by ‘links’ and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen as the kooky grandfather of the Internet.” Unfortunately, the analog technology of the early twentieth century was not up to the task. (Here’s the wiki on the Mundaneum, which incidentally might make a good title for my next book.)

See also: The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

Add comment 29 March 2010

Ross Emmett on Innovation

| Peter Klein |

Here are some provocative videos on innovation from Ross Emmett. The series is called “The Constitution of Innovation.” The first three are posted at vimeo:

See Ross’s website for more information.

Add comment 15 March 2010

Mises Quote of the Day

| Peter Klein |

Nothing can be known about such matters as inflation, economic crises, unemployment, unionism, protectionism, taxation, economic controls, and all similar issues, that does not involve and presuppose economic analysis. All the arguments advanced in favor of or against the market economy and its opposites, interventionism or socialism (communism), are of an economic character. A man who talks about these problems without having acquainted himself with the fundamental ideas of economic theory is simply a babbler who repeats parrotlike what he has picked up incidentally from other fellows who are not better informed than he himself.

This is from Mises’s introduction to the 1959 edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s massive 3-volume set, Capital and Interest. Mises gives some further admonitions: “A man not perfectly familiar with all the ideas advanced in these three volumes has no claim whatever to the appellation of an economist.” This is, shall we say, a minority view. And my personal favorite: “A citizen who casts his ballot without having studied to the best of his abilities as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties. He neglects using in the appropriate way the power that his citizenship has conferred upon him in giving him the right to vote.”

Those lacking time to study Capital and Interest in its entirety may enjoy this new edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s essay “Control or Economic Law,” which is more easily digested.

8 comments 10 March 2010

Gene Fama’s Autobiography

| Peter Klein |

Here’s an autobiographical essay by Gene Fama written for the Annual Review of Financial Economics. Fama’s work on agency theory (with Mike Jensen) and on corporate finance (with Ken French) should be of particular interest to O&Mers, though some may disagree with his introductory claim that “[f]inance is the most successful branch of economics in terms of theory and empirical work, the interplay between the two, and the penetration of financial research into other areas of economics and real-world applications.”

Fama’s Chicago-Booth colleagues add the following note about Fama’s institutional leadership, presumably directed at today’s Fama-bashers:

Rather than rest on his laurels or impose his own views on the group, Gene has always sought the truth, even when it appeared at odds with his own views. . . . The current finance group at Chicago includes a diverse set of people who specialize in all areas of modern finance including, behavioral economics, pure theory, and emerging, non-traditional areas such as entrepreneurship and development that were unheard of when Gene arrived at Chicago. Contrary to the caricatured descriptions, there is no single Chicago view of finance, except that the path to truth comes from the rigorous development and confrontation of theories with data.

4 comments 4 March 2010

Williamson Tribute in California Management Review

| Peter Klein |

Six new essays on Oliver Williamson by Haas School colleagues appear in the new issue of the California Management Review. They’re behind a subscription firewall, but just $6 a pop. Check ‘em out:

Institutions, Politics, and Non-Market Strategy
de Figueiredo, Jr., Rui J.P.

Holdup: Implications for Investment and Organization
Hermalin, Benjamin E.

Antitrust Economics
Shapiro, Carl

Regulation: A Transaction Cost Perspective
Spiller, Pablo T.

Williamson’s Contribution and Its Relevance to 21st Century Society
Tadelis, Steven

Williamson’s Impact on the Theory and Practice of Management
Teece, David J.

Thanks to Mike Cook for the tip.

Add comment 15 February 2010

Happy Schumpeter Day

| Peter Klein |

Today’s the birthday of Joesph A. Schumpeter, one of the great theorists — and one of the great characters — in the history of economics. To celebrate, how about remembering some of the classic Schumpeter quotes:

“[Competitive] behavior . . . is the result of a piece of past history and . . . as an attempt by those firms to keep on their feet, on ground that is slipping away from under them.”

“The process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism … it is not [price] competition which counts but the competition from . . . new technology . . . competition which strikes not at the margins of profits . . . of existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”

“Intellectuals are people who wield the power of the spoken and written word, and one of the touches that distinguishes them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs . . . .The critical attitude [arises] no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker — in most cases, also an outsider — than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value.”

“[C]apitalism, while economically stable, creates a mentality and a style of life incompatible with its own fundamental conditions. [It] will be changed, although not by economic necessity and probably even at some sacrifice of economic welfare, into an order of things which it will be merely a matter of taste and terminology to call Socialism or not.”

Update: Walter Grinder reminds me that it’s also Julian Simon’s birthday. Here’s a nice tribute from Steven Moore.

5 comments 8 February 2010

Brad’s Bloviations, Part #2,235

| Peter Klein |

Brad DeLong accuses non-Keynesians (Austrians, Chicagoites, and other sensible people) of “los[ing] themselves amidst their early-nineteenth century books, one hundred and seventy years behind the state of the art in economics,” just because they think public spending and deficits might be crowding out private-market activity, making it difficult — impossible, actually — to come up with meaningful estimates of “jobs saved” by stimulus spending. If you can get past Brad’s adolescent writing style (anyone citing Bastiat, for example, is “a truly clueless idiot”), you find that he is indeed very “progressive” in his thinking — he’s made it all the way to 1950. Brad, like most Keynesians, is stuck in the C + I + G world of undergraduate macro. His argument is that the stimulus can’t be crowding out private-sector jobs because (a) wages aren’t rising (implying that stimulus-funded workers aren’t being bid away from other potential opportunities) and (b) T-bill prices aren’t falling (suggesting that private employers aren’t competing with the Feds for credit).

Leave aside for the moment that Brad has no idea what wages and bond prices would be in the absence of stimulus. The key problem with Brad’s argument, noted by Russ Roberts, is its reliance on crude macroeconomic aggregates. As pointed out here many times, heterogeneity matters. Sensible economists care not about the aggregate unemployment rate, but the effect of stimulus activity on individual labor markets. Stimulus affects the composition of employment, not just its level. (more…)

8 comments 3 February 2010

Murray N. Rothbard

| Peter Klein |

Jeff Tucker reminds me that Murray Rothbard passed away 15 years ago today. I remember the moment when I heard the news, from Parth Shah at a restaurant in DC, where we were attending the American Economic Association meeting. (This was before smartphones, Twitter, and the like, and news traveled more slowly.) I was stunned — Rothbard was not yet 70 — but my wife reminded us that he hadn’t looked well when we saw him the last time, the previous summer at the Mises Institute instructional conference in Claremont. (He died of congestive heart failure.) Check out the photo montage at Jeff’s post — see if you can identify younger versions of Ralph Raico, Roger Garrison, Bill Evers, George Reisman, Leonard Liggio, and others.

I consider Rothbard one of the great theorists of the twentieth century, and think his contributions to technical economics are greatly undervalued, even by many of his Austrian-school admirers. My own work has been heavily influenced by Rothbard (one of my most-cited papers is basically a gloss on a Rothbardian idea). Joe Salerno and I are working on a price-theory text (based on our lecture series) that builds heavily on Rothbard’s analysis in Man, Economy, and State. We hope it contributes to renewed interest in mundane Austrian economics.

5 comments 7 January 2010

The Collected Works of Henry Manne

| Peter Klein |

Via Geoff Manne, a description and ordering information for the new Collected Works of Henry Manne, produced by Liberty Fund. A great collection of scholarly articles, reviews, and shorter popular pieces divided into three volumes, “The Economics of Corporations and Corporate Law,” “Insider Trading,” and “Liberty and Freedom in the Economic Ordering of Society.” Order your copy today!

Add comment 5 January 2010

Studying Entrepreneurs

| Peter Klein |

Great opening from Robert Whaples’s EH.Net review of T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf, 2009):

Economists have always had a hard time dealing with entrepreneurs — as individuals and in the aggregate. We sort of know what entrepreneurship is and that it can have a profound impact on economic performance, but it’s usually just too difficult to model and measure. What we do not understand, we simply ignore and leave to others. After all, we are firm believers in comparative advantage and studying entrepreneurship — even if it is economically important — doesn’t seem to be our comparative advantage. In the view of most economic historians, it is the rules of the game — the incentives and the institutions — that really matter, not the players. American economic history has been cast as the story of millions of diligent and clever beavers working away and transforming the landscape. Take one of them away and nothing of great importance will really change. (In fact, most of us seem to believe that if you take away an entire technological complex, like the railroads, little of much importance would really change.)

Why, then, should economic historians study the careers of entrepreneurs? Not all of us should. But for some, the study of entrepreneurs will illuminate the past and the present — and put life into our cliometric narrative.

Joe Salerno has a valuable treatment of this problem in his 2008 paper “The Entrepreneur: Real and Imagined.”

Add comment 4 January 2010

Happy Birthday, Ronald!

| Peter Klein |

Happy Birthday to Ronald Coase, 99 years young today. Live long and prosper!

Favorite under-appreciated Coase essay of the day: “Business Organization and the Accountant.”

Update: Oops, Mike Sykuta tells me that the birthday is actually tomorrow, 29 December. (I blame the Coase Institute, which sent out a Facebook message on 28 December saying “Congratulations to Ronald Coase on his 99th birthday today, December 29.” I didn’t catch the goof.)

Update II: A friend asks why new institutional economists live so long. I suggested a keen appreciation of comparative institutional analysis, reflected in a version of the old adage, “Getting old isn’t so bad, once you consider the feasible alternative.”

Add comment 28 December 2009

Ironies of Avatar

| Peter Klein |

I took the kids to see Avatar this weekend. From a technical standpoint, Jim Cameron’s film is remarkable, a breakthrough, as good as advertised. The alien world Pandora is stunningly realistic, detailed, convincing. The computer-generated characters look and move like real actors. The battle scenes are phenomenal.

But the storyline didn’t grab me. It’s a twist on that familiar Hollywood trope: evil, materialist, capitalist, militarist humans versus nature-loving, low-carbon-footprint, New Agey savages so noble they would have made Rousseau blush. The computer-generated landscapes are dazzlingly three-dimensional, but the characters, both human and alien, are cartoonish and one-dimensional (especially the Head Evil Capitalist, played here by Giovanni Ribisi, essentially reprising Paul Riser’s role from Cameron’s Aliens). The Pandorans are in their own way as clichéd as Peter Jackson’s much-derided Skull Islanders. I appreciate the film’s antiwar, anti-imperialist message, but really, the Earth First! propaganda is way, way over the top. And consider these ironies:

1. Avatar was written and directed by bazillionaire businessman Jim Cameron, is produced and distributed by giant corporation 20th-Century Fox, and will likely gross hundreds of million dollars. Naturally the film’s villain is — you guessed it — a giant corporation! Because, you know, businesspeople and money and corporations are evil and stuff.

2. The film was made possible by Cameron’s highly innovative, beyond-the-state-of-the-art, years-in-the-making technological innovations. Yet one of the film’s main themes is the evils of technology and capital accumulation and the beauty of live-for-today, pre-industrial society. The Pandorans literally worship their planet and don’t just hug their animals and tress, they physically bond with them through some mystical (and anatomically curious) process. The poor humans, one of the characters explains, have destroyed their own “Mother.” Blech.

Update: Peter Suderman beat me to it, calling Avatar

one of the stupidest major movies in recently memory, blithely peddling a message that its entire production process actually undermines. That Avatar’s melodramatic attacks on corporate interests and its defense of simple, natural living come packaged as one of the most expensive, and probably the most technically advanced, corporate films in history would seem to indicate that only quality bigger than the movie’s stupidity is its head-in-the-clouds hypocrisy. Cameron’s made a movie that he intends to be epic and awesome, but the only thing that’s awesome here is his total lack of self-awareness.

Stephan Kinsella sees a libertarian defense of property rights, and so do I, but for me that message was buried beneath the eco-propaganda. Had the earthlings homesteaded some piece of unoccupied Pandoran land, put it to productive use, and then the natives decided they needed the land or that its economic value belonged to “Mother Pandora,” is there any doubt what side Cameron would be on?

20 comments 20 December 2009

The Thoughtful President

| Peter Klein |

The President’s supporters portray him as thoughtful, well-informed, and deliberative. Unlike his predecessor, who acted on impulse, rarely considered dissenting points of view, and lived in a protective bubble, Obama reads, understands alternative perspectives, and thinks through arguments. Look how long it took him to decide on an Afghanistan policy!

And yet, on economic policy, the President is shockingly parochial. He has repeatedly challenged critics of his stimulus program to “produce a single economist” who opposes his actions. Anyone who disagrees with massive government borrowing and expenditures to “rescue” the economy is simply an obfuscationist, a partisan trying to score cheap political points at the expense of the national good. I think Obama genuinely believes this. He’s certain he’s right, so criticism bewilders him. He simply can’t fathom that there might be honest disagreement on basic economic issues. For Obama, the range of macroeconomic opinion runs from, say, Krugman to Summers. It’s like Pauline Kael’s famous line that Nixon couldn’t have won in 1972 because “no one I know voted for him.”

Of course, I’m not expecting a White House invitation for me and my friends to present Austrian business-cycle theory. But you’d think he might listen to Cochrane, Zingales, Mulligan, Becker, Glaeser, or even Mankiw.

This is our thoughtful, well-informed, deliberative Chief Executive?

2 comments 17 December 2009

I Wish I’d Written That

| Peter Klein |

Arnold Kling on PAS:

[P]rior to Samuelson’s formalization in economics, there were a lot of papers published that lacked clarity and insight. Now that formalization dominates, we also see a lot of papers that lack clarity and insight. If you compare the most insightful mathematical papers with the average non-mathematical papers, math wins. But one can also run the comparison the other way and reach the opposite conclusion.

1 comment 16 December 2009

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