Economics Still Not a Discipline

The other day I mentioned that there was a spirited round of debate about anxious to rescue a way to stop thinking Matthew Yglesias and others insisted that it was so because economists agree on so much that the disagreements are really just some form of noise or so. Not, as it turns out, so.

Paul Krugman writes of the Real Business Cycle, don't ask, that he

know[s] that RBC exists; I know how it works; I just think it’s wrong.

So he understands that other economists explain the economy in way that is wrong. They don't, in other words, agree about a fundamentally important aspect of their discipline's purpose, which -- I assume -- is explaining the way the economy works.  He goes on to argue that

is that it’s OK to consider other economists, even a whole school of thought, wrong; what’s not OK is to be so closed-minded that you aren’t even aware that there are not obviously stupid people who disagree with you.

In the post he mentions that Bradford DeLong, a really odious example of Neoliberalism, takes the same bunch to task and offers them remediation.  DeLong suggests that

[t]here were a lot of things that economists like Frederic Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, and John Stuart Mill knew in 1830 about the origins of aggregate demand shortfalls and the usefulness of expansionary fiscal policy in a downturn that modern Chicago never bothered to read, never bothered to learn, or have long forgotten.

I don't know maybe the insights of folks who had no clue of what capitalism was going to become have useful insights into how to "manage" the economy; but it strikes me odd that in a debate about who is right in matters dogmatic the solution is to turn our attention to people dead lo these many years. It similar to arguing in a debate about, say, the Earth's age we need to go back and read Charles Lyell because he got it just right.

DeLong's quotes also make the point that none of the "freshwater" economists read Krugman because they think he is wrong about everything.