Utopia, you are standing in it!

George Stigler in the lecture “Economics or Ethics?” (1980):

The proposition that economists are not addicted to taking frequent and disputatious policy positions will appear incredible to most non-economists, and implausible to many economists. The reason, I believe, for this opinion is that in talking to a non-economist, there is hardly anything in economics except policy for the economist to talk about. The layman is unequipped to discuss with an economist the problems that concern professional economics at any time: he would find that in their professional writing the well-known columnists of Newsweek are quite incomprehensible. The typical article in a professional journal is unrelated to public policy—and often apparently unrelated to this world. Whether the amount of policy-advising activity of economists is rising or falling I do not know, but it is not what professional economics is about.

The great economists, then, have not been preoccupied with preaching. Indeed…

Laws prohibiting same-sex marriage deserve to get “shredded” in court, and Judge Posner did a masterful job of doing the shredding. I suppose that he was helped by the fact that counsel arguing on behalf of the Indiana and Wisconsin laws also did a masterful job of allowing themselves to be shredded by the judge. Amazingly enough–or, perhaps not–the lawyers were not even prepared to lend anything resembling substantive support to their claims that same-sex marriage somehow “devalue” heterosexual marriage, or that children of a same-sex couple would not be better off if their parents could marry, or what “harmful consequences” might arise from permitting same-sex marriage to be legal. Professor Dale Carpenter, whose blog post I linked to, sums up the situation nicely with the following:

In many ways, the oral argument encapsulated the 25-year debate over same-sex marriage, in which  opponents have failed to come up with…

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…

The other day David Friedman created a bit of a stir by questioning the uniqueness of Austrian economics:

Yesterday I spoke at a Students for Liberty Conference. Before the talk I had a conversation with several students who identified themselves as supporters of the Austrian school of economics. I asked them if they could explain what that meant by identifying a proposition in economics that almost all Austrian economists and almost no non-Austrian economists would agree with.

One response was along the lines of “Austrians believe that one can derive economic conclusions from convincing axioms without adding any empirical facts.” So I asked them to give me an example of such a conclusion, of a statement that one could  test, observe the truth or falsity of in reality, that could be derived in that way.

I now put the same two questions to any readers of this blog who consider…

Are you and Richard Posner locked in a publications arms race?

Judge Posner and I are good friends. A few years back, Ronald Dworkin wrote an essay attacking the two of us simultaneously and we decide at lunch on Friday that we would co-author a response. I wanted to get the jump on the response, so I worked very hard over the weekend and produced a seventeen-page, single-spaced paper with no footnotes, which I faxed to Judge Posner on Monday morning. That was fast. I got back to my office and on my chair was a fax from Judge Posner which was thirty pages, single-spaced, with complete footnotes. So, publication races he wins.

From Harvard Law Record Q&A