6 Comments

Spot on, Arnold. Civil discourse has withered in recent years but I for one will stand against the wind and continue to express views, to critique comments lacking in basic logic, and to question bald assertions on social media and elsewhere from both sides of the aisle, always with civility.

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You keep using "left" & "right", but it's not clear what those terms mean in what you're saying.

I'd say Matt is, and claims to be, on the left, solidly Democrat. Admittedly with more acknowledgments of good opposition arguments. Tyler didn't support Trump, and Trump supporters are the vast majority of the "right" today, so Tyler is more center/Libertarian -rightish.

MAGA is, and will be for this decade, the Republican voters; many GOPe are not quite on board with this:

a) strong border controls and opposition to illegal immigration (possibly with less, or more, legal immigration - the key step is enforcement of current laws, first. Learning from Reagan's mistake.

Tyler often wanting more immigration)

b) Opposition to unfair Chinese trade policies, IP theft, and human rights abuses like slavery. Reponses include tariffs and other barriers to trade (Tyler opposes US govt actions despite Chinese govt actions and policies and the trade imbalance).

c) Conservative, pro-life judges (Tyler pretty pro-choice)

d) Tax cuts (Tyler generally supportive).

e) Skepticism of man-made global warming / most proposed reduction policies.

f) Anti-Political Correctness; now Critical Race Theory.

g) Opposition to Obamacare, especially the required individual mandate.

h) Patriotism for America; what is good about the USA, and why it's good.

It's not easy to find "intellectuals" who openly supported and support President Trump's positions, much less him as a person. But he's been the dominant single personality "on the right" since he was elected, and he remains that. Too much is talked about him as a person, or about the undefined "right", and not enough about specific policies.

It's easier to categorize many things into fewer categories so as to generalize, and then one can discuss groups better. The desire, even the academic NEED, to discus groups, groups that are statistically significant, is partly driving out discussion of individuals. We need more discussion that is individual based. And many may support various MAGA policies without supporting them all, and without supporting Trump.

One of the biggest pairs of discontinuities involves the tax cuts and the pro-life policy. Lots of pro-life folk aren't so happy with tax cuts for rich corporations - and many economics who support tax cuts aren't strongly against abortion. When you say "the right", who are you talking about?

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I'm wondering how much of this relates to Twitter's scale, like a cameras in the courtroom problem. Past some threshold of participants/audience members, a conversation becomes a performance. Lots of layers of signaling to worry about, which become transaction costs for honest participation. I'd like to think intermediate platforms, like a smaller econ-twitter, could find the optimal scale, but maybe that's naive.

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the key is for authors to believe that they will be judged on rigor, not on emotion and bias

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Titter [] doesn't give one time for rigor - shoot from the hip (shoot your mouth off) FAST, or you're too slow to be "part of the conversation". All great performances involve great emotion.

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Dissent is never welcomed. Even in the 1960s, it was hard for young economists to question neoclassical microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics. About the former, you should remember both the struggle to expand positive micro and the challenges to normative micro. About the latter, you should remember the struggle to question its "micro" foundations and the challenges to the pretension of fine-tuning macro policies. By 1965, the paradigms of neoclassical micro and Keynesian macro became "too narrow" to accommodate new ideas, but in the following 15 years, many marginal changes were introduced. Unfortunately, your post refers only to the Keynesian macro which --as you have argued elsewhere-- is based on the aggregates of national accounts (a very gross method of aggregating the economy's outcomes).

Anyway, Hume was right in his time and he'd have been right to rely on his view of money to explain the Great Inflation, but both Friedman and Sumner are wrong about how to introduce money in Keynesian macro (actually, they don't introduce it as Patinkin attempted in the early 1960s since they just add the identity D=S and rely on wrong assumptions about the supply and the demand for something called "money").

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