Truth Claim of the Day

New York Times Easter Sunday Believability Edition

In a way, the doubts that modern religious believers harbor about the resurrection of the dead may reflect, not the triumph of  rationalism over supernaturalism, but an odd symbiosis between the two.[...] People today may disbelieve in the resurrection of the dead, in other words, not because it’s too fantastic, but because it doesn’t seem fantastic enough.

Please, discuss. The context can be found here.

Friday Video Extravaganza

Some of the funnier moments from this week, after the jump.

Keynesians vs. Austrians

or "The Problem Left-wing Academics have with Right-wing Academics"

First, Paul Krugman at the New York Times offers his view on the fatal flaw of Austrian economics. Krugman has a knack for summing up what he thinks is wrong with other people, particularly economists. Usually the lack of subtlety annoys me, but I think this comment is clear and on target:

And the key to all this, I believe, is that the Austrian abhorrence of explicit models, even for the purposes of clarifying thought, leaves them unaware of the holes in their account.

Just to make sure we don't think he's become a charitable reader of flawed ideas, though, Krugman expands on his complaints in the earlier post:

Austrians are basically Keynesians in denial — self-hating Keynesians? — pretending to themselves that they’re not using ideas that are in fact essential to their story.

 Harsh. Possibly true. But harsh.

Finally, Brad DeLong offers a more detailed commentary on specific claims he associates with Austrian economics. He agrees with the idea that speculation and imprudence led to a housing bubble, but disagrees with the sources of the imprudence, the lasting effects, and how the government should(n't) respond to it. The comment I can most get behind is as follows:

Requiring trend deflation [...] in order to keep nominal spending without a trend would be more likely to generate waves of universal bankruptcy, deep financial crises, and big recessions than our current system.

I've long held that Austrian economists have good insights to offer, but they are not good at monetary policy. I tend to favor Kruman and DeLong's criticisms in this case, although not their tone. If any of you are familiar with Austrian economics (usually through Congressman Ron Paul), I'd love to hear your responses.

Economists vs. Historians

An interesting recent piece by Justin Fox at the Harvard Business Review discusses why more and more the leading intellectuals of our day are economists instead of historians. Fox's initial conjecture was that economists tend to be much better at keeping our professional work incomprehensively impressive while their popular work is very approachable. Historians, he contends, don't separate these two functions as well.

Fox cites an unnamed economist as suggesting that people are drawn to economists because most of their work, unlike historians, revolves around predicting the future (unsuccessfully, but still). I'm always amazed to see this description of economics brought up so frequently by economists, especially since it is in all cases followed immediately by "Of course, I don't work on forecasting, but..." I'm not sure what economics they're reading, but most of the work I see involves trying to explain the recent past, not make influential predictions of the future. And I'm one of these darned Macroeconomists the other guys are always complaining about. For people who are actively trying to divine the future, I'd check out folks in finance and investing.

Historians tend to see the shift in a different light:

It's that, especially in the U.S., only the tiniest minority of academic historians concern themselves anymore with matters of economic policy (or diplomacy, or war, or politics in the big-picture sense). The discipline has moved mostly to the study of identity (gender, race, etc.) and culture, ceding territory to the economists and political scientists.

This is essentially the argument Ezra Klein aligns with (although he still likes that inexplicable divination argument) in his comment on the piece:

But I also think that the answer is partly that the public debate is substantially about what's happening with the economy. That's true when you're talking about the economy, but it's also true when you're talking about something like health care, where the majority of the discussion focused on the bill's impact on deficits and premiums and paychecks. And it'll be true when talking about financial regulation (will it reduce the availability of credit?) and mostly true when talking about cap-and-trade (will it hurt growth or my bank account?).

I think there's a fair amount of traction to this argument, but it doesn't really explain why the historians decided to "cede territory" to the economists in the first place.

Now, I hesitate to offer this explanation for fear of embracing hubris, but maybe historians have let economists deal with economic matters because economists are better at it. I would never claim that the answers we offer are flawless, but when it comes to identifying the most important influences on the important decisions people make (most of which are even explicitly about market exchange), economics seems to have at least as much to offer as any other discipline, and in many cases more. I tend to think people listen to economists on these matters because what economists have to say has proven more beneficial than the competition. And competition, as Fox notes, is a good thing:

Over the past half century, economists have come to utterly dominate thinking about economic matters, and begun to insinuate themselves into lots of other fields too. Business education, and business advice, has certainly become much more economics-oriented. Which isn't all bad. But even an economist would agree that we could use more competition in the marketplace of ideas. Right?

Fox sees economics dominating the ideas market as something that will result in less competition. I think it is at least as likely that economics dominates as a result of increased competition.

One more bit of evidence? Consider one area in which economics is really bad at offering useful ideas: the study of identity, where the clear winner is historians and the other humanities.

Friday Video Extravaganza

Hit the jump for the fun.

An Announcement

Maintaining this blog has been a lot of fun for me. I enjoy posting my thoughts, hearing yours, and in general I like the format of discourse Metadoxy has provided. However, given my family obligations and the difficulty of my chosen dissertation topic, I'm afraid I just don't have the time to maintain this as a solo project... and I haven't exactly had a lot of requests for co-bloggers. After careful consideration, I have decided to shut down this blog. I'll let my current slate of scheduled posts run out, but after a couple of weeks that will be the end. It's been great, folks, so there's one more fun video after the jump.