Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Rather than saying, with Stigler, that industrial policy is too dangerous because it is too vulnerable to rent-seeking, more economists should be writing papers like this: Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov: The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named: Principles of Industrial Policy: "Industrial policy is tainted with bad reputation among policymakers and academics and is often viewed as the road to perdition for developing economies. Yet the success of the Asian Miracles with industrial policy stands as an uncomfortable story that many ignore or claim it cannot be replicated. Using a theory and empirical evidence, we argue that one can learn more from miracles than failures. We suggest three key principles behind their success: (i) the support of domestic producers in sophisticated industries, beyond the initial comparative advantage; (ii) export orientation; and (iii) the pursuit of fierce competition with strict accountability...

Anybody who has spent any time looking at the data knows that it is in the boom, not in the depression, that the work of sectoral readjustment is done. Indeed, that work cannot be done in the depression. In the depression nothing is profitable. So how could entrepreneurs possibly judge then what will be profitable when the depression is past? They must wait for the boom to see:

Robert Heilbroner (1996): The Embarrassment of Economics: Schumpeter arrived in his famous riding habit and great cloak, of which he divested himself in a grand gesture. He greeted us in a typically Schumpeterian way: "Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche." The remark shocked us...

Hoisted from the Archives: This serves as a good index of how much Milton Friedman's redefinition of "neutral monetary policy" to mean "whatever monetary policy keeps nominal GDP on its trend growth path" led people prone to motivated reasoning in a laissez-faire direction completely and horribly astray. It also serves as an example of an astonishing failure to mark one's beliefs to market. Never mind that the rough constant of M2 velocity before 1980 had been an obvious example of Goodhart's Law, and never mind that even before 1980 forecasts of the state of the economy one and two years out based on M2 were inferior to other forecasts, by 1997 James Buchanan had just seen a remarkable five-year 30% runup in M2 velocity. and the complete ditching of monetary aggregates not just as targets but even as indicators by Alan Greenspan in favor of a neo-Wicksellian "neutral interest rate" approach that had nothing whatsoever to do with an "effective monetary constitution" of any type: