This week, in MacDermid v. Discover Fin. Servs., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the dismissal of four out of five causes of action against Discover by a man alleging that his wife’s suicide was induced by the credit card company’s threats of criminal prosecution and jail time. Though it reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the fifth cause of action, an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim, the Sixth Circuit's opinion reveals two major problems with the limited legal liability for credit card companies that prey upon the mentally ill.

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I think that there are two ways to understand the divergence of perspectives here. The first is to note that Jamie Galbraith sees Keynes's General Theory as part of something bigger: combine it with John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State, with Hyman Minsky's approach to financial crises, and perhaps with Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities and you have an alternative theoretical framework for economics that owes very, very little to the Marshallian or even the Smithian tradition--and that owes nothing at all to the Walrasian tradition. Call this "East Anglian Keynesianism."

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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is warning the Israeli government not to pursue the “Syrian option” at the expense of the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Rice told the Washington Post that regardless of the merits of pursuing the Syrian track (about which Rice is skeptical), "there is no substitute for trying to get to the place where the Palestinians finally have their state and the Israelis finally have a neighbor who can live in peace and security with them."

She said that the "Israeli-Palestinian track is extremely important" because it "unlocks” the door to "further engagement between the Arabs and the Israelis."

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I stand rebutted.

Note to self: When you are taking on Brad DeLong, do not write "You will not find it in Keynes" when you mean, "You will not find it in the relevant chapters of The General Theory."

Having made that concession, let me now empty it of force and meaning.

In 1925, Keynes had not completed the "struggle of escape" of which he speaks in the introduction of the General Theory, published in 1936. Indeed, there he writes of his own "lack of emancipation from preconceived ideas" only five years before.

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I can't refrain: I just watched Gloria Borger of CBS using public broadcasting television to criticize Al Gore as the "zen master of coy" because he won't tell her that there are no circumstances under which he would run for President. Gwen Ifill joined in taking potshots. This by the way at the author of the number one book on NYT non fiction best seller list. When that place is held by one of the media none dare do anything but fawn over their colleague, consumed by envy though they may be. But in this case, they know or care nothing about "Assault" and so they go, as always they have done, at the person not the principle, the messenger not the message.

Ms. Ifill and Ms. Borger agreed Mr. Gore was "just selling books." Hello, folks: by selling this book he's trying to get a message to the American people that they have no chance in the world of hearing from either of you, which is that our ability to reach reasoned conclusions and take intelligent action is fatally compromised by, among others, you! I can understand why you would be chagrined by this message, but why don't you feel some duty at least to report it?

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I’m finally done studying for the hardest exam I’ve ever taken (note to self: do not take Real Analysis while in law school), so now I’m back to tax. I’ve been out of the loop with news lately, but to start things back up, here is a good article shedding some much needed light on the Democratic 2008 budget proposal.

The political parties could not be more different in their characterization of the plan.

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Before plunging into George F. Will’s “confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable,” let me point out three noteworthy features of his argument: 1) he doesn’t mention a single conservative individual who has actually governed, 2) the only concrete fact or figure he marshals is that health care constitutes 16 percent of the economy and rising, and 3) he is reciting exactly the same rigmarole that he and other conservatives have repeated since before Reagan was president, as though the failures of conservatives to deliver on their promises while in power during most of the interim somehow isn’t germane to the discussion.

Over to George:

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Julie Nelson makes what I see as a very good point about:

Elephants in the Room | TPMCafe: the present and coming crisis in care. Mainstream economics assumes that people are autonomous agents. Yet everyone is only one car accident, or a few decades (in one direction or the other) removed from being a dependent patient, child, or frail elderly person. Traditionally, women were expected to take care of all these “messy” lives, as (low-status, and low-paid or unpaid) nurses, mothers, and daughters. Health care in the U.S. is a joke, unless you have a lot of money (or access to the kind of health insurance enjoyed by tenured economists). Hospitals continually complain of “nursing shortages” and understaffing puts patients in danger. With an aging population, these issues are going to get worse, not better.

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Jamie Galbraith writes something that I sense is profound and important, but that I cannot quite grasp:

Invasion of the Name Snatchers | TPMCafe: What is interesting about the recent change in the mainstream is that... you can no longer reliably cite mainstream economists as defenders of arch-reactionary political positions. They are not necessarily against minimum wages, or regulation, or full employment. But what are they for? Above all, they are for an economics that remains fundamentally centered on the concept of markets, but now conceding, rather than denying, market imperfections.

Keynes' General Theory is not centered on markets. It is, rather, centered on the elements of the national income accounts... and on the working of the financial system. My father's major work of theory, The New Industrial State, is centered on organizations, and not on markets. For this reason, these works remain deeply subversive of the orthodox project. For this reason, they are largely excluded from the orthodox curriculum. Meanwhile, students and bystanders are told that the "best elements" have been absorbed into the mainstream. Don't believe it.

The New Industrial State is centered on organizations. But I don't think the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is centered on the NIPA in the same way. There are lots of markets in the General Theory--loanable funds and liquidity preference and the money market, the state of long-term expectation and the stock market, unemployment and the labor market, demand determination and the goods market. But they don't equilibrate in the standard classical way. The interest rate that is supposed to guide the flow of loanable funds is instead set by the quantity of money and momentary liquidity preference. The stock market that is supposed to assess the long-term value of investment is instead a game of musical chairs. And so forth.

I had hopes thirty years ago that evolutionary game theory and related ideas could be used to reformulate ideas in the New Industrial State and the General Theory in ways that would have more rhetorical force within economics. Building on Larry Summers's key insights that markets are dominated not by the rational but by the wealthy, that rational individuals maximize expected utility while wealthy individuals maximize expected wealth, and that risk drives a wedge between those two allowed us to achieve some success in mathing-up some ideas in the "State of Long-Term Expectation" chapter of the General Theory:

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy 98: 4 (August 1990), pp. 703-738 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000603.html

But I was never able to get any farther in that research program.

David Ruccio and Thomas Palley have just described some of the problems they think economics should be addressing. Let me add a couple more:

1. Climate change. This enormous elephant in the room is finally receiving some attention in the U.S.—even, at long, long, long last, from the Bush administration! Yet the usual argument against working to prevent catastrophic effects is that such action would be “bad for the economy.” Economists near silence in responding to this claim is deafening. Even those economists who do look at climate change tend to take the most conservative assumptions and apply mathematical discounting techniques that make enormous negative consequences in the future pale in comparison to minor present costs. At the most, one may hear a suggestion for the “creation of markets” for greenhouse gas emissions. We need economists who take these threats—and science!—seriously, and are willing to think and act more broadly in relation to this issue. I think contemporary economists are going to look really, really silly (and irresponsible) in any future retrospective, fiddling while Rome burns (and New Orleans floods).

2. The present and coming crisis in care. Mainstream economics assumes that people are autonomous agents. Yet everyone is only one car accident, or a few decades (in one direction or the other) removed from being a dependent patient, child, or frail elderly person.

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It's all Suresh Naidu's fault.

There I was, head down, revising "Capital and Its Complements: The International Macroeconomic History of the Late Twentieth Century" and "The American Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future," and ignoring the TPM Cafe symposium on heterodoxy on economics. Then Suresh Naidu caught me in the Peixotto Room: "You must have something to say," he remarked, as we stared out at the fog swirling around the Golden Gate from our concrete, glass, and steel eyrie eighty feet above the Berkeley campus.

And now the intelligent and thoughtful Jamie Galbriath trolls the bait further. How can I resist?

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The first Director of Policy Planning at the State Department was George Kennan. The 25th will be National Intelligence Council Vice Chairman David Gordon. The formal announcement is likely to be made in the next two weeks.

David Gordon is an outstanding choice for this key position in America' foreign policy establishment. Gordon is polymathic and knows that there is an enormous gap between yesterday's threats and tomorrow's. He worries about the declining water table in China. He thinks about resource wars and about the proliferation of "half-states", or "failing but not quite totally failed" states. He has great facility with classic military and geostrategic thinking -- but he's been trying to work through the many dark nightmares outlined by people like Robert Wright, Robert Kaplan, and Bill Joy for some time.

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I rarely read anything about Arabs and Jews that surprises me. I have been involved with this area since the 60's so I think I've pretty much seen it all.

But then I read this piece in the Jerusalem Post and I couldn't figure out what the author is talking about. Even if his facts are accurate, what difference does it make?

What exactly is he trying to say? What is the subtext here? TPMers are smart. Anyone interested in deconstructing this.

I'm not kidding. I'm at a loss.

Participating in this exchange is becoming addictive, but it has been worthwhile because progress is being made. Even Paul Krugman now reluctantly ‘fesses up that it’s “the sociology of the profession”. I anticipate his admission will yield intellectual dividends down the road – perhaps a NYT op-ed.

With sociology finally out of the closet, now is a good time to turn to economic theory. Diane Coyle asks “What can heterodoxy do for me?” which is a good (but also slightly revealing) question.

Her earlier opening post acknowledged that many of today’s innovations in mainstream economics have their roots in heterodoxy – albeit that is too often unacknowledged in citations. For instance, consider new endogenous growth theory and the total passing over of earlier work by Kaldor, Myrdal, and Verdoorn.

Today, heterodox macroeconomics (the patch in which I toil) is buzzing with important and challenging questions.

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Permit me to congratulate Chris Hayes for having clarified a number of important issues and the folks at the TPMCafe for having realized (or perhaps not, for contingency always has a role to play) that staging a discussion about mainstream and heterodox economics would elicit a great deal of interest among practicing economists, other academics, and the wider public. Perhaps Clinton was, in the end, right about one thing (“It’s the economy, stupid!”)

And permit me, in addition, to make a couple of points pertaining to the ongoing discussion.

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For the most part, this debate has taken as given that the economics profession is resistant to change and to unorthodox ideas. Is that true?

As a macroeconomist, it's hard to view economics as stationary. When I think about the macroeconomics I learned thirty years ago, which was a traditional Keynesian IS-LM model, and compare it to what we teach today, I see vast changes in both the theoretical models we use to understand the world, and the tools and techniques we use to analyze our models.

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Brad DeLong is brilliant, period. Anyone who reads his blog, let alone his papers, knows this. Still, it is breathtaking for him to accuse David Ruccio of intellectual claim-jumping –whether rightly or wrongly is not the point and I won't get into that – and *then* to lay down the law on what is "Keynesianism."

Have a look at that reading list. The phrase that turns up repeatedly is "sticky prices." This is no accident. For a certain type of modern macro-economist, sticky prices are the essence of what they call Keynesian doctrine. It is the essential term in the lexicon of self-described New Keynesians. Because prices are sticky, New Keynesians argue, markets do not clear, and there is a role for government in fighting unemployment. So far, so good. I have many friends and allies among New Keynesians on practical policy questions.

But to make this into the economics of John Maynard Keynes is to do deep violence to the ideas of that economist. And the attempt to do so, which goes back to the very first American reviews of the General Theory, is the essence of the intellectual claim-jumping that infuriates heterodox economists. Joan Robinson, who may be taken as an authority on this, called it "bastard Keynesianism."

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Thomas Palley writes at TPM Cafe:

Are Heterodox Economists Just Unhappy Whiners? | TPMCafe: I was not planning to make further formal contributions to this discussion. However, Diane Coyle’s... claim is that heterodox economists are just unhappy whiners (a.k.a. whingers)..... I would like to give a couple of concrete examples that counter Diane Coyle’s claim that heterodox economists have nothing to complain about. So please bear with me.

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I have a serious problem with David Ruccio's showing up here with Economics Outside the Mainstream | TPMCafe. Let me tell you why. We need a little intellectual backstory: Fredric Jameson is a powerful, brilliant, provcative, and thought-provoking cultural critic. The arguments he makes in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism about the relationship between cultural forms and the shape of material life at the end of the twentieth century may be right and may be wrong, may be fruitful and may turn out to be dead ends, but are certainly worth exploring--are properly part of anyone's optimally-diversified intellectual portfolio. Jameson has taken his ideas and hung the word "postmodernism" on them as an identifying label.

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Edwards, Clinton and Obama have unveiled drafts of their healthcare plans. I say “drafts” because, for each, the plan is a work in progress. All three have indicated they have more to say on the subject.

Reforming healthcare is a complicated business, but I’m optimistic that we are heading in the right direction because the three candidates agree on some of the most important points.

If only their supporters could see that. Instead, when Barack Obama released his health reform plan, he came under fire by Democrats who saw the plan, not as one of three proposals that might advance the discussion about heath care reform--- but as a litmus tests as to whether Obama deserves to be president. The verdict: Obama may be too cautious.

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So the Bancroft family will meet with Murdoch's folks to discuss the offer. This is probably a slippery slope that will end in the Journal becoming part of the Murdochian news manufacturing machine. You may think it doesn't matter if we lose the Journal's aggressive, fair, and detailed reporting on the business of business, but it does, very much.

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My view is that the neoclassical economics toolkit can be very, very useful--no, stronger than that, is very useful and necessary--for everybody from the center on left. The methodological individualism of the toolkit forces you to look at real people and how situations help or hurt them. The competitive market benchmark assumed by the toolkit requires you to think carefully and specifically about just where the externalities are that keep you from relying on markets alone to solve whatever problem you are looking at. The equilibrium conditions established by the toolkit force you to check for unanticipated consequences, for blowback due to changes in incentives and so forth.

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Is dissent alive and well in economics? Chris Hayes’ affirmative finding has stood up pretty well in our discussion, I think. Stars, at least, make a go of it. In "The Methodology or the People?" Paul Krugman makes a useful distinction between our interest in Topic A, the analyses that economic dissenters bring to bear (or fail to bring to bear) on the intellectual/political problems in the world; and Topic B, the sociology of the economics profession. The two are related, naturally. But they sometimes get mixed up.

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For those of us who labor in the arcane world of telecommunications policy, this had been a red-letter week. One presidential candidate, and one person who should be a presidential candidate are helping to put the issues of who owns the Internet front and center. Who knew?

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"Involuntary unemployment should be confined to cases of specialized skilled workers . . . Such unemployment is far below the levels usually characterized as the "noninflation-accelerating rate of unemployment," sometimes referred to as the "natural" rate of unemployment, in one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined."

-- William Vickrey

The intellectual chauvinism of the profession's academic elite has consequences for the real economy, for the living standards and life chances of billions of souls the world over. It's not that the accepted wisdom has produced error. That is true in every discipline. It is that the errors all run in the same direction -- favoring the interests of those with power. Perhaps that is to be expected as well, but it doesn't mean we should blind ourselves to the reality.

Nor is it my contention that the assortment of reigning theories and methods are intrinsically at fault.

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"Involuntary unemployment should be confined to cases of specialized skilled workers . . . Such unemployment is far below the levels usually characterized as the "noninflation-accelerating rate of unemployment," sometimes referred to as the "natural" rate of unemployment, in one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined."

-- William Vickrey

The intellectual chauvinism of the profession's academic elite has consequences for the real economy, for the living standards and life chances of billions of souls the world over. It's not that the accepted wisdom has produced error. That is true in every discipline. It is that the errors all run in the same direction -- favoring the interests of those with power. Perhaps that is to be expected as well, but it doesn't mean we should blind ourselves to the reality.

Nor is it my contention that the assortment of reigning theories and methods are intrinsically at fault.

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Yesterday, Rick Perlstein posted this item on the Bush Administration and mad cow disease. It seems that Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, a small meatpacking company based in Arkansas City, wants to test all its animals for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE); the Bush Administration is seeking to prevent Creekstone Farms from doing so, because Creekstone might set off a mad “scramble to the top” in which larger meatpackers test all their cows as well, lest Creekstone gain an unfair market advantage by advertising its commitment to food safety.

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I understand that it’s hard to resist arguments that tilt against the conventional wisdom, but this tendency led to two particularly frustrating bits of analysis in the Washington Post.

The format for the two pieces is almost exactly alike. They start out—I’m only slightly paraphrasing—“we all know inequality is on the rise and that the middle class and the poor are getting squeezed, right? Wrong!”

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TPMtv has kept itself pretty busy in its early days with the US Attorney purge scandal. But to assuage the clamoring masses, today’s episode of TPMtv decides to shift gears and take a stab at Iraq, particularly the recently completed war spending bill.

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To treat both the issues of both heterodox ideas and marginalized social groups that have been raised in this discussion, how about considering feminist economics? Now, wait—before you stop reading—consider whether you really know what this field is about. I have found many heterodox as well as mainstream economists more than willing to take off on flights of reaction without actually reading any works by feminist economists. Does it seem that there may be a teensy bit of gender bias in the assumption that economic actors are rational, autonomous individual mental choice-makers (while somebody else takes care of emotions, dependencies, and bodies?).

Perhaps there is a smidgen of fear behind the my-math-is-bigger-than-your-math criteria for research acceptance? Feminist economics has been an organized field now for more than 10 years, with a journal (Feminist Economics) and international organization (IAFFE). Apparently Chris Hayes missed our ten sessions at the winter ASSA meetings. (But thanks for the late invitation to join the discussion, Chris.)

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If you're like me, you're all about Al's point that this whole internets thing is providing a great platform for hashing out real issues. Real issues, like what theoretical framework we use to analyze our economy and how that framework is or isn't shielded from dissent by a roving band of vigilante Department Chairs. But, maybe also like me, you've been too busy doing actual work to keep up and read 16 posts in two days.

Fear not dear reader, if you want to follow the last two days of this titillating debate but are just joining us, we've put together a quick summary that will catch you up in just over 500 words. Special thanks to new TPM intern Evann Smith for helping me put this together.

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Reader DS wields Occam's Razor in a cogent attempt to make sense of the Bush crowd's long-term strategy in Iraq. The goal, he maintains, must be: permanent bases. Josh adds a corollary: "We're permanently occupying Iraq to lock down the world oil supply."

It gives us something of a sense of intellectual mastery when we can give rational reasons why the White House & Co. chose their catastrophic course in Iraq. We have recourse to the familiar vocabulary of goals, strategies, tactics, causes, effects. We get the familiar picture of a group of strategists who, after considering alternatives the way rational people do, deduce that a certain course is the most likely to achieve their goals. They start from faulty premises, true, but it is somewhat reassuring (if in a paranoid way) to imagine a deliberative circle who think their situation through and come to the conclusion that, say, democracy and therefore anti-Islamist stability will result from radically changing the game in Iraq with an invasion; and/or that they need to secure the local oil fields in perpetuity.

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In my post yesterday, I defended my claim that the country leans right by addressing the criticism that "liberal" is a stigmatized term that prevents ostensibly liberal people from identifying with it. This post will address the criticism that regardless of how people identify themselves, they in fact have liberal views and policy preferences.

As I noted, Paul Waldman of Media Matters and other liberals have cited polls showing that self-identified moderates prefer greater spending in a number of policy areas, such as Social Security, education, and even aid to the poor. Waldman concedes that moderates are "moderate"—midway between liberals and conservatives—on some issues, but asserts that "it is exceedingly hard to find an issue where moderates and conservatives stand on one side and liberals stand on the other."

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Not on this blog, but relevant, Atrios points out, correctly, that very few mainstream economists were out there pointing out that claims about market manipulation were perfectly good economics. This gets at a point I should have made more clearly. When I said that neoclassical economics, by which I mean combining the working assumption that people are rational with some kind of equilibrium, is consistent with questioning free markets, I didn't mean that economists do that sort of questioning often enough. On the contrary - but the point then is that the problem isn't the methodology, it's the people. (And yes, if you like, the sociology of the profession.)

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I had been wondering if any contributors to this debate would respond to my comments about the near-exclusion of certain social groups from economics, and finally Thomas Palley did so – but only to dismiss them as irrelevant compared to the social exclusion of heterodox white male economists. I do agree with him that economics is important because of its influence on policy and in society more widely through its effect on practices in business and financial markets. This is why I regret the social exclusiveness of the subject; even though there are many fine economists from all identity groups who do research economic outcomes for women and members of minority groups in society, their perspective simply can’t be the same as that of a researcher from one of those groups.

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Health care is poised to be front and center in the upcoming Presidential election. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report highlights a recent opinion piece by Atul Gawande in the New York Times describing the multi-layered crisis in the health care system. Gawande, a surgeon and New Yorker contributor, fears the rising apathy towards the crippling problems of the system: mounting costs to employers and individuals, over-crowded emergency rooms, and the growing rolls of uninsured and underinsured Americans. Thankfully, health care has featured prominently in recent Presidential debates and candidates are being pressed to develop and propose solutions to the broken system.

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I was not planning to make further formal contributions to this discussion. However, Diane Coyle’s contribution has raised important issues that need responding to. Essentially, her claim is that heterodox economists are just unhappy whiners (a.k.a. whingers). This is a tactic that is used over and over again to put down those subject to unfair exclusion and discrimination. Moreover, her use of this tactic is particularly ironic given that she ends with a call for more females and non-whites in economics.

Reading her piece I see little substantive engagement with arguments made in earlier postings. My own posting focused on misunderstanding of the scientific method and lack of awareness of the sociology of knowledge that are vital parts of vulgar mainstream intellectual intolerance. Together they support dismissive responses along the lines that: “Economics is a science, you’re just plain wrong, and everyone who matters knows it.”

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The clock is ticking. In 20 months the neocons, who have essentially dictated US foreign policy since 2001, will be out of power.

After January 2009, it won't matter what Podhoretz, Perle, Adelman, Kristol, Cheney, Feith, Bolton, Krauthammer, Libby, Wolfowitz, Wurmser, Pletka and assorted other warriors say on any foreign policy issue.

They will be out in the cold, for good. With the Iraq war as their lasting legacy, they will not be coming back.

That is why the next 20 months are so dangerous. They know that this is the last chance they have to take out Iran.

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A comment by "Commenterlein" from the 'Mafia' thread at Tyler Cowen's very fine Marginal Revolution blog, in response to criticism of his anonymous attacks (here as well) on the undifferentiated multitude of heterodox economists:

"Barkley, The things I put my name to are carefully thought through (or at least I try to), then written, then read and re-read many times, then put onto the shelf for at least a month, then re-written, and then maybe finally shown to other people. Even with this approach, plenty of stuff which I regret five years later has made it into my published work. My commenting on blogs is something I do while waiting for a slow regression to converge, and is certainly not at the level of quality I would like to see associated with my name. I understand and respect that you and many others think differently about this issue, but now you know why I don't want to reveal my identity."

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you rigor in the Academy.

I don't have time to weigh in on all the issues here, but I'd like to warn against an error I think both sides tend to fall into: assuming that you have to use heterodox economics to reach conclusions critical of free markets. As I said, both sides tend to fall into that error: the heterodoxishly-minded bash neoclassical economics because they claim that it automatically makes you a defender of capitalism red in tooth and claw, and the free-marketeers reject warnings about markets gone wrong as somehow necessarily reflecting ignorance of economic theory. It just ain't so.

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With congress on recess this week and the revelations of Monica Goodling's May 23rd testimony long since absorbed and digested by the media, it may feel to some like the U.S. Attorney scandal is just hanging in the air like so much dead weight. President Bush for one is certainly fatigued by the whole thing. “This investigation is taking a long time…” he groaned during a May 24th Rose Garden press conference, “… kind of being drug out.”

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Most of the points to be made about Chris Hayes' recent article on heterodox economists and their place within the economics profession have been made here already, so I am going to take a bit of a different approach and talk about one of the heterodox economists discussed in the essay.

One of the first heterodox economists mentioned is Michael Perelman:

I strike up a conversation with economist Michael Perelman in the hallway. ... Perelman, who is there for the EPI reception, works at the margins of the discipline; he is one of a few hundred self-described "heterodox" economists at the conference. ... I ask him about how he relates to the so-called mainstream of his profession. "It's a mafia," he says quietly, his eyes roving over to the suits spilling out of the Freedom to Choose room.

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These days, it is hard to avoid seeing CNN and now CBS commentator Lou Dobbs campaigning as the self-appointed champion of the middle class. (And you thought it was us here at Warren Reports?) In recent months, Dobbs has tilted more and more away from issues like the decline of real wages and health care reform, and towards illegal immigration. This week, David Leonhardt of the New York Times called Dobbs on his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his habbit of playing fast and loose with the facts. Turns out that, contrary to Dobbs's wild-eyed rants ("that's incredible"), immigrants aren't bringing a new wave of leprosy to the USA, or filling our prisons.

But lets assume we can get the rhetoric and facts straight, as Dobbs tries to do here. The bigger question is whether the middle class has any real stake in this debate? ...

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No matter how many times we tell these stories, folks outside of economics are simply incredulous. “You really mean those of you who are outside the mainstream don’t. . .” Get published in the mainstream journals? Right. Get hired in the departments of major colleges and universities? Right. Get grants from the National Science foundation? Right again.

The same is true of those who are mainstream economists. Everything looks rosy from where they sit. Normal science. Peer review. All reasonable arguments are accepted in the marketplace of ideas. Except they never read any heterodox economics, and have no idea how the hegemony of their favorite theory shuts out all other ideas. Those from Marx and Veblen and Sraffa and Robinson and so many others. They’re not taught and they’re not discussed. (They don’t even exist in the history of economic thought, since those courses are not even offered by most Ph.D. programs in economics anymore.)

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Implicit in Christopher Hayes’ article in The Nation about the sources of change in mainstream economics are a tacit proposition and an urgent question. The proposition is that what economists think is somehow loosely connected to events in the political world, sometimes leading those events, sometimes scrambling to catch up to them. (In its strong form, this is the old saw about economists and political philosophers rule the world through their ideas.) A question animates Hayes’ inquiry, Is economics changing? Can we learn things at economists’ conventions that might foreshadow something about tomorrow’s political world and prove useful in it?

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