Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley, writes about economic history, policy, book reading and how economists think.
HN commenters cite it for analyses of wages, social insurance and economic history, and for his critiques of David Graeber's book Debt.
I think ideology plays a strong role in addition to interests. In my mind (from reading about this a lot) there are roughly four political factions at the elite level (there's probably more variation at the grassroots level).
The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s).
The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things.
On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say…
The author of the tweet also has some excellent advice on learning the history of economics, which is to start from the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. Then follow that up with Das Kapital (which I know is an unpopular stance here on HN) and some Keynes (who is credited with coming up with the economic theory that helped bring the UK and US out of the Great Depression). Here's a snippet of Prof. DeLong's advice:
> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into…
> I had never heard of Heritage before I read the article I posted,
Well I have and they're hacks and frankly they make you look bad by citing their one note analysis of QE.
Brad Delong just this morning on Stephen Moore (coauthor of your citation):
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/stephen-moore-is-a-headline-speaker-at-the-app-goldbug-grifter-conference-stephen-moore-also-tells-lots-of-lies-see-a-patte.html
Jonathan Chait on Moore: Guy Who Gets Paid to Say Obamacare Doesn’t Work Can’t Find a Single True Fact to Support His Case
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/obamacare-hater-cant-find-single-true-fact.html
> but I'm inclined to trust actual economic analysis and a clearly rigorous understanding of the situation
You won't find that at Heritage, they do propaganda water carrying not serious economic research. Heritage is another incarnation of the scientists that worked for tobacco companies. The econmists that work at Heritage aren't paid to do real economic analysis, they're paid to support Heritage's policy positions with something that looks like real economic analysis.
> From the little I've read of Krugman, I'm baffled as to how he received a Nobel prize.
Uncontroversial pick, was one of the favorites.
> His opinion pieces in the NYTimes are TERRIBLE and seem to be written with one goal in mind: start as large of a flame war in the comments section as possible.
His opinions throughout the financial crisis have stood up as well as anyone…
Some of us believe living in a place, especially a place one was born/grew up, should be a right, not a privilege. Here's Polanyi (with comments from Brad Delong) on land:
"Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution:
Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful....
Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the…
Don’t read it. Save your brain for a book that isn’t riddled with so many errors Brad DeLong wrote ten articles on the errors in Chapter 11.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.html
> I have read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years thoroughly and despite Graeber’s readability, scholarship, and erudition, it is a very bad book. Its tone is much too polemical. More important, when it gets to the more recent history that I know well, it is riddled with errors and distortions. Beyond that, it suffers from serious conceptual confusions, and in his excellent critique, Robert Murphy has only scratched the surface.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html
>> How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect:
> Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages
The above is a quote from Debt about Apple.
Here is the index of posts about errors in Chapter 11.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/.services/blog/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/search?filter.q=Graeber
Chang seems to be conflating two visions of economics: one vision of economics that says how things are, and one vision that says how things should be. There's a lot of overlap, of course, but one is economic theory and one is political theory. In the former, there are well studied areas of economics where we have consensus for cause and effect[0][1][2][3]. To just point to areas of disagreement and say the whole field is bad reminds of those who point to disagreement on abiogenesis and say evolution is wrong. Not to say that agreement indicates correctness, but disagreement doesn't indicate that everyone doing research is wrong.
The article's other problem with economics seems to be that it assumes people are unfeeling, which is a fair criticism but not one that is particularly new. There is a field called Behavioral Economics which tries to address this and is on the radar of pretty much every economist[4].
The problem I think is more that economics never reaches people directly but is filtered through politics. I was reading on Bradford DeLong's blog the story of Mankiw, who is a respected economist but worked for the Bush administration, where he felt he had to be silent about incorrect economic theory but he could influence them in small ways to be better on economics, effectively trading truth and reputation for a small amount of power[5].
[0]: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tariffs
[1]:…