Monday, July 26, 2010

Assault of Thoughts - 7/26/2010

- Two about-faces on liquidity preference and sub-optimal output. Brad DeLong shares how Niall Ferguson went from being a guy that recognized liquidity preference put us on a sub-optimal production level and that we could have both "guns and butter" for a period (oddly enough, he understood the logic a decade ago and thought it applied, but he doesn't think it applies now). Robert Samuelson, on the other hand, has an article talking about the breakdown of Okun's Law - and at the end he essentially makes a liquidity preference point. He also makes a lot of interesting institutional arguments for the breakdown of Okun's Law. Brace yourself, though. You're going to cringe when he calls the thoroughly Ricardian terms of labor and capital "Marxist vocabulary". I guess strictly speaking it's not inaccurate. It is Marxist vocabulary. But it's also pretty standard, orthodox, classical vocabulary.

- Evan has an interesting post on book buying habits, following up on his recent thoughts on Amazon.

- Mario Rizzo has a critique of Brad DeLong that I think falls a little flat. See if you agree - my comment is a little ways down. Let me give this to Rizzo - if his interpretation of DeLong is accurate, his critique is correct. The problem is, his interpretation is a little silly and he reads way too much into what DeLong said.

- The Wall Street Journal publishes a "well duuuuhhhh" article on language and culture (which I suppose is still better than a wrong article, which they've certainly had more than a few of recently). Hasn't anyone heard of Wittgenstein? Speaking of Wittegenstein, he was a friend of Keynes's. Keynes once wrote, after picking Wittgenstein up when he came in to visit "Well God has arrived; I met him on the 5:15 train". Apparently the guy made a positive impression on Keynes.

10 comments:

  1. Do you know if Keynes ever spied for the USSR?

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  2. If he did I was not aware of it.

    Do you have a shocking revelation to make?

    I'll feature it in a "Some Defunct Economist" post if you do.

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  3. No, I've been reading a lot about him and discovered he was friends with or knew a number of Soviet spies. There are also the "Cambridge Five" who I believe graduated long after Keynes went to college there. He could also have been a spy for Britain too ... Britain has a long history of turning scholarly types into spies - Chaucer being the earliest I can recall.

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  4. He was also a Fabian, and while Fabians weren't communists, they were often sympathetic to a lot of what they thought the USSR stood for.

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  5. "Mario Rizzo has a critique of Brad DeLong that I think falls a little flat. See if you agree"

    I don't agree. It is a spot on critique.

    @Xenophon:
    I didn't know Keynes was fabian. I thought he never knew what he was until the day he died. A bad person would say "too bad he lived ten years longer than he should," but his theories were already implemented and established way before 1936, so his "school" would still exist, probably with a different name.
    Let's face it, DeLong would still be a moron if he would be an adept of Marx or Malthus of Safra (oh my God, he is!!!).

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  6. As for the Fabianism - I don't know if he was officially in the Fabian Society, but he was definitely the Fabian sort. He could have been, in other words. Xenophon - do you know if he was officially a member, or are you thinking of "Fabians" more philosophically and less organizationally. Either way wouldn't surprise me.

    Anonymous -
    My biggest concern with Rizzo is that DeLong never explicitly made any of the statements that Rizzo attributed to him, and the statements he did make were explicitly about the foundational theoretical assumptions of economics (he even used examples from other sciences to give you a sense of what he was thinking of). Where did DeLong say what you and Rizzo think he was saying.

    Also - not sure if you're a regular on here or not, but

    (1.) we like to try and avoid anonymous posting, and
    (2.) death wishes and accusations of other people being a moron without any additional content contributed in a post are generally frowned upon on here, by the hosts and the commenters. Please try not to slip into that.

    Welcome to the blog.

    I reference DeLong and Rizzo both a lot on here (not to mention Keynes). Three brilliant men that are worth talking about. Feel free to look back at old posts on them.

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  7. I have read that he was a Fabian. I just assumed that was the case. But I've never confirmed it.

    Nothing about it on the EconLib bio of him: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Keynes.html

    I had thought that Keynes was part of the Fabian Society at Cambridge, but I was confusing that with the Cambridge Eugenics Society.

    Keynes would have found a number of people he knew well (and would have supported his ideas) in the Fabian Society:

    "Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, countries allying themselves against Germany) could lead to war." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society#Young_Fabians

    So, I'd say at this point, no he was not a member of the Fabian Society - at least officially.

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  8. During this bit of online research I did discover that Skidelsky wrote an apparently controversial bio of Oswald Mosley - just bought it.

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  9. Mosley is yet another shady character that Lovecraft cites favorably in one of his pieces on the economy. It was written in 1933, though, which I suppose is marginally better than writing about Mosley favorably in 1936.

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  10. That would have corresponded roughly with the height of Mosley's popularity (and that of the BUF) in Britain.

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