All econobloggers should use French history analogies

Noahpinion: "Like the wars of Louis XIV, the push for a rehabilitation of Old Keynesianism resulted in a lot of sound and fury, but only modest territorial gains."

Despite this, his argument is that actually on a deeper level, in terms of the face of macroeconomics in the public sphere, what he calls "the Krugman insurgency" has had the consequence of once and for all puncturing the image of unity and certainty among economists. Economics no longer speaks at the rest of the public sphere with a single, authoritative voice  ("one thing is for sure - we're not going back to talking about how abortion affects crime rates") but is instead openly a politically volatile field of debate.

And yet, the political bloc that is so often described as being associated with the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical economics--namely, the roll-back of the welfare state or its replacement with market-facilitating policies--is as strong as it's even been, if not stronger. From this perspective, the great service that "the Krugman insurgency" might perform is to demonstrate beyond a doubt that the intellectual products of economists aren't a driving force politically. Indeed, it is possible from within the theoretical presuppositions of mainstream economics to make arguments for the welfare state, for market regulation, etc; if policymakers have ignored those potential arguments, it's a result of their politics and not some feature of the theories they use, or at least cite in their public justifications.

If the circle of students surrounding a couple of professors on my program were to produce a list of "working principles", this would be one of them: "In general, politically well-connected intellectuals are selected on the basis of the balance of social forces, and this produces the affinity between predominant intellectual discourses and the interests of politically dominant groups. Thus, at least as a rule of thumb, the structure of discourse of the most influential intellectuals does not so much cause the biases of political debate and action as vice versa."