On @UnlearningEcon
Unlearning Economics is a person somewhere on planet earth. He or she has been debating with Simon Wren-Lewis and Nick Rowe (on twitter). Brad DeLong joined the discussion.
But what about me. Elisabetta Addis (we’re married) just returned from Palermo. I was eager to talk with a physically present human being having not done so all day. First I said “Hodor” (and had to explain). Then, looking for a topic, I said, “Unlearning economics is someone who is debating”.
She said “incredibile” and showed me her smart phone. On the small screen I could read (barely) the post by unlearning economics which I was planning to discuss.
OK now we are reading the post so that we can discuss it.
The world is highly connected. The 21st century is very strange.
LOL…the world is connected, and so are you. Keep up the narrative…does this include more on Wren=Lewis, DeLong, Nick, and Addis?
The world is indeed getting very strange. Most of the people I “talk” with I have never met, and probably never will meet. This can’t be natural; we were not “designed” for this.
I have never met Peter Dorman either
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2017/03/economics-part-of-rot-part-of-treatment.html
What Nick Said. Both parts, but especially the last one.
And that’s basically true of the people with whom I’ve been working for the past six months, too.
The case against austerity does not depend on whether it is ‘good economics’, but on its human impact.
Or as someone else has said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The history books will later explain that Economics was awakened from its dogmatic slumber (or, alternately, exposed and excised from the academy) because blogs opened up the reasoning of very smart economists to other very smart people who had escaped the winnowing and inculcation of the barriers to entry to the academic field.
Those smart people noticed subtle, but in some ways obvious, basic failures of reasoning that underly field. For a decade or so, it persisted by claiming that each attack was limited to some subset of the great science, but eventually too many outsiders became clued in to the failures.
http://thorntonhalldesign.com/philosophy/2014/5/8/change-your-mind-and-see-what-was-always-there
Thornton,
I read your post and I’m sorry but I think you missed the main problem. The main problem is that economics confuses and economists themselves get confused because they use everyday words in very specialized ways and constantly and sometimes unwittingly switch between them. The very worst examples are in fact savings (which can mean either non-consumption production, non-consumption of income or money in the bank) and investment (which can mean physical investment in productive equipment, accumulation of assets or purchase of financial products).
I want by the way to put a special word out for Nick Rowe, who of all the economic bloggers around seems to me the fairest and the readiest to interact with readers of all I am aware of. Even when we often agree, I wish there were more like him.