Yet More New Deal Revisionism Blogging...
A correspondent writes:
The problem with the NYT story is that it reports a "controversy" which is not in any serious sense an intellectual controversy, as opposed to agitprop theater, and amateur agitprop at that. Shlaes's book is engaging in some respects -- a character defense of Samuel Insull! -- but contains no economic analysis to speak of. Nor did her comments at the CFR session. And she's prone to flagrant error. For instance on page 7 of her book she states that industrial production did not increase in the US after 1932. In fact, from 1932 to 1936, it doubled...
I think well of [Patricia] Cohen's work generally, but it would be reasonable to go beyond the "she said, he said" reporting, to ask whether the claims being made have any actual merit. In the final session, which Cohen apparently attended, [Galbraith] pointed out very clearly that by presenting an average value for unemployment in the 1930s Shlaes was grossly misstating the actual history and reality, which is that unemployment peaked in early 1933 and fell sharply and steadily in the first four years of the New Deal. But Cohen didn't pick up on it...
Richard Haass was warned that the program that Sebastian Mallaby and Amity Shlaes had put together should have been cancelled--that it would not educate the public and that it would cost the Council on Foreign Relations substantially in terms of its reputation as an honest broker. Haass seems to have thought that he could rescue the event by parachuting Michael Bordo, Richard Sylla, Peter Temin, and James Galbraith in at the last minute to add economists both with expertise and free of wingnuttery to the event. They acquitted themselves well, as did Price Fishback. (Robert Lucas was interesting... but in the end disappointing, as he ignored all of the issues that come up when one attempts monetary expansion when safe interest rates are at the zero nominal bound.)
Howard comments:
An Open Letter to Patricia Cohen of the New York Times: one of the many problems with contemporary journalism is that it is taught as a craft and presumed to be transferable to any subject. The odds, in short, that patricia cohen has the background to understand what she was hearing are very slim, but a a new york times reporter, she believes that she is capable of grasping and presenting anything in a matter of days. We see this kind of abysmal lack of background at work over and over again in our media discourse...
This from Stephen Seidman is worth promoting:
I'd like to second the preceding comment. You don't see chemists these days making claims for the validity of the phlogiston theory, physicists (at least since the "German Physics" of the Nazi era) trying to discredit relativity and quantum theory, or biologists (since Lysenko) reviving Lamarck. Is economics anything more than a collection of conflicting models and theories, with each under constant attack from the proponents of the others? Is there a generally accepted set of core principles that define the subject? If so, are the arguments just about the correct application of these principles, or is it that some economists are choosing a model to produce a desired answer?
It's actually worse than that. It's not as though Prescott, Shlaes, and McGrattan are promoting the phlogiston theory. It is that they claim to have lit charcoal in fire in the presence of oxygen and produced not water, carbon dioxide, and heat but rather cold and little spheres of silver.
And this, from an anonymous lurker:
Patti Cohen's "beat" is enormous. Anything at a university, foundation, or think tank that might be noteworthy becomes her default responsibility. Stuff that goes on in academia would be part of many reporters' beats rather than cordoned off to just one. The web is going to make this situation better, including Patti Cohen's life -- though she will be paid much less. A list of her assignments is http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/patricia_cohen/index.html:
