Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: June 1, 2007...
Six posts: Peggy Noonan on June 1, 2007 saying that she had long been an internal exile from the Bush administration whose victory she gloated over back at the end of 2004; a close encounter with a Tom Turkey; three pieces noodling over what "orthodox", "heterodox", and "Keynesian" economics are; and two links worth reading.
None seem to me especially worth highlighting and hoisting today...
The principal takeaway from ten years ago today is, I think, that the devotees of "heterodox" economics did not (and, for the most part, still do not) engage with what they call "orthodox" MIT and Berkeley economics as they are and were—or with John Maynard Keynes as he really was, but rather with straw men caricatures. And in so doing, they vastly weaken the case they make and their set of potential allies.
- Hoisted From Comments: Tomas Excommunicates Me from the Church of Keynes... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/hoisted_from_co.html: "Sticky-price macroeconomics in which wages fall only as a consequence of high unemployment is Keynesian--one of the strongest branches of Keynesianism, in fact. A clue to this is that the 'radical uncertainty' people whom Tomas approves of (who are another branch of Keynesianism) grabbed the label 'post-Keynesians' for themselves..."
- I Rise, Like a Moth to a Flame... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/i_rise_like_a_m.html: "It's all Suresh Naidu's fault.... Jamie Galbraith is right in his assertion that there is much more in Keynes than in mainstream American MIT Keynesianism... descended from Franco Modigliani (1944).... Tobin, Bernanke, Summers, and Gertler are not figures without status in 'orthodox' American economics today..."
- An Insight from Jamie Galbraith that I Think Is Profound... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/an_insight_from.html: "I had hopes thirty years ago that evolutionary game theory and related ideas could be used to reformulate ideas in the New Industrial State and the General Theory in ways that would have more rhetorical force... building on Larry Summers's key insights that markets are dominated not by the rational but by the wealthy... [who] maximize [not] expected utility... [but] expected wealth..."
- Speaking of the Thunderdome... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/speaking_of_the.html: "On the uphill side of the one-lane driveway: One tom turkey, 32" long, 12 lbs..."
- Stupidest Woman Alive! Peggy Noonan Edition http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/stupidest_woman.html: "A special Peggy Noonan mashup. Paragraphs from November 4, 2004, and June 1, 2007, mashed together and arranged in random order..."
- links for 2007-06-02 http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/links_for_20070.html: "Summers... Surowiecki..."
