I’ve been picking on Matt Yglesias lately. Partly because he often makes bad arguments, but also because I find it distasteful when people refuse to take their opponents’ arguments seriously. The other day I was browsing the econ blogs and someone linked to an old blog post of his where he criticized Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The amazing thing about the post is that he dismisses it based solely on second-hand accounts of the theory by other economists — namely Paul Krugman, Tyler Cowen, and Bryan Caplan.
I’ve written on this before, but all three of these economists have misinterpreted the theory (at least in the works Yglesias links to. If they’ve offered more accruate accounts of the theory elsewhere, I’d be happy to read them). Rather than critiquing ABCT, they end up critiquing some garden variety theory of sectoral shifts. Consider these examples:
Bryan Caplan:
Even…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Oct 11, 2014 @ 11:59:21
Milton Friedman thought this was a load of crap. He was right
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