Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Naming names

Krugman comments on the Ferguson gay-childless Keynes bashing affair, and gives a list of other recent members of the Lunatic Fringe. His list:
1.Robert Barro pointing to the decline in private spending during World War II as evidence that multipliers are small, somehow forgetting rationing and all that.
2.John Cochrane and Eugene Fama confusing accounting identities with causal relationships, and reinventing the Say’s Law fallacy.
3.Robert Lucas misunderstanding Ricardian equivalence.
4.Robert Samuelson and Olli Rehn asserting that Keynes wouldn’t have been a Keynesian given current debt levels, without checking actual British debt in the 1930s (which was much higher than debt now).
5.John Taylor equating Fed policy to hold down interest rates with a price ceiling on, say, apartment rents.
This list could be complemented with the one by Brad DeLong on other authors (which include Mankiw and Schumpeter) who have used similar arguments against Keynesian economics.

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