Mark Thoma agrees with Brad DeLong that it is always a mistake to surf over to NRO, sighting a really bad piece about the Phillips Curve as reason. Largely, I have to agree with him, but I have to make a small exception for friend and former colleague Bret Jacobson as well as Commentator alumnus (and proud new papa) Mark Hemingway. Both are excellent writers, entertaining and informative. So, you know, maybe it’s only almost always a bad idea to surf over to NRO.
For the record, this paragraph may be the worst description of anything related to the Phillips Curve I’ve ever seen.
Even though inflation has been going down and probably will continue to fall, we’re going to starve the banks of cash because some long-dead central planner named A.W. Phillips said that growth is bad for prices.
That short paragraph basically embodies all that outlets like NRO and the Weekly Standard have done to discredit arguments against state intervention. That entire piece essentially amounts to standing in a room full of people shouting DEMAND KURVE! in that Matt Damon voice from Team America. Look, you’re not going to find a more pro-market sort of person than I am, but you’re also not going to find somebody who hates bad arguments more. So, if you’re going to argue that Bernanke shouldn’t have loosened in an attempt to smooth the transition, fine, go right ahead, and I’ll probably agree with your main point…but if you don’t have the sort of understanding you can glean from reading the output of millions of virginal nerds, it’s probably time to go home and let the adults talk about policy.
And this is a lesson a lot of people need to learn, disagreeing with somebody’s policy conclusions without calling him or her an idiot. It’s a lesson I’m still working on, which reminds me I need to update the “About” page and remove that calling Paul Krugman an idiot thing if I haven’t already. He’s a lot of things: bad columnist, weirdly obsessed with liquidity traps, suffering from a big hatred of Bush..but the man won the Clark medal and he teaches at Princeton. And he’s done a lot of really good an interesting economics over the years.
