Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

I am undecided whether Robert is right or whether Posner is simply in Republican hack mode--remember, this is a big defender of Rehnquist and Scalia and company in Bush v. Gore we have here.

Robert:

Robert's Stochastic Thoughts: Posner accused Romer of intellectual dishonestly because he was sure that a speach she gave on the effect so far of the stimulus was not "responsible academic analysis." He knows that Romer has worked in the field and is a top notch academic economist (Posner has been cited a lot and, perhaps coincidentally, judges intellectuals by their citation count so he must know that Romer has been cited a lot too). I think he has an idea of what top notch academic economists are like based the ones he knows at the economics department and business school of the University of Chicago. There is indeed a huge contrast between their academic work and Romer's speach. However, there is no contrast at all between Romer's academic work and her speach. The speach is clearly, among other things, the continuation of a decades long research progect. I think that Posner can't get his head around the fact that work which is viewed with contempt at the U. Chicago economics department is massively cited....

Professor Judge Posner has made mistakes which should be totally humiliating but is not humbled... a factor of 16 arithmetic error... unfamiliar with national income and products accounts... unfamiliar with federal budgetary terminology... arithmetically challenged... unfamiliar with the standards of academic research at Berkeley (and Harvard)....

[Romer's speech] is exactly the sort of thing that Romer wrote when she was a professor at Berkeley. It is clear to me, and many others, that, when Posner contrasts the speach to Romer's academic work, he displays his total ignorance of her academic work. I think the problem is partly that the economics profession is divided into schools of thought--roughly fresh water and salt water.... I think it very likely that Romer's speech and her academic work is considered to be not* "responsible academic analysis" by top economists working at the economics departments of the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota. My guess (and it is a wild guess) is that they don't consider it to be economics.... The number one top leader of the school (Prescott) condemns econometrics as such and, in effect, argues that one must assume his theories are true even if they are inconsistent with the data. Even among those who don't regect econometrics as such, there is a profound disagreement about methodology.

At Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT simple calculations are demanded.... [O]ne must start with summary statistics, then look at correlations and cross tabs or something, then work up to a multiple regression (OLS), then probably do something with instrumental variables with identifying assumptions comprehensible and convincing to the man on the street.

This is pretty much a description of Romer's speach....

Basically [Posner's] argument was that the speeh did not include the sort of analysis required to get a paper published in, say, the AER if you ignore the sort of analysis required to get a paper published in, say, the AER which was contained in the speech but ignored completely in his critique of the speech. Some (Thoma mostly) suggest that Posner is showing contempt for the economics profession.... My guess is nearly the opposite. I suspect that he is in contact with macroeconomists who share his view of Romer's speech, and that this made him sure he is on safe ground.... [H]is view is that Romer's speech is not respectable academic economics because it clearly involves taking the IS-LM model seriously and considering the concept of a multiplier and because the empirical work is a combination of simple reduced form calculations and simple easily comprehensible instrumental variables regressions such that no fancy economic theory or econometric technique is required.

I think Posner genuinely doesn't know that a large fraction of the economics profession agrees with Romer's approach...