Are We Getting the Better Public Sphere That We Need for a Fruitful Intellectual Dialogue About Equitable Growth Issues?: Paul Krugman Is a Happy Camper and Says Yes, But David Brooks Sys No…

To nobody’s surprise, I am going to side with Paul here…

I do, however, think that a big source of the difference between their takes is a result of the much sunnier climate for technocratic rational policy on the center-left than on the currently-beleaguered center-right…

Paul Krugman: The Facebooking of Economics:

David Brooks has a funny piece… about… Thought Leaders…. [In] my own neck of the woods… the rules of the game in economics are… nothing like what David describes….

It used to be the case that… you had to have formal credentials and a position of authority…. Today the ongoing discourse, especially in macroeconomics, is much more free-form. But you don’t get to play a major role in that discourse by publishing clever Slateish snark; you get there by saying smart things backed by data….

Economics journals stopped being a way to communicate ideas at least 25 years ago… publication was more about certification for… tenure…. In some fields rigid ideologies blocked new ideas [from journals]…. Ken Rogoff… wrote about the impossibility of publishing realistic macro in the face of “new neoclassical repression.”… At this point the real discussion in macro… is taking place in the econoblogosphere…. It’s a lot like the 17th-century coffee shop culture Tom Standage describes in his lovely book Writing on the Wall….

So who are the players in this world?… I don’t see any of Brooks’s Thought Leaders…. I see a lot of solid professional economists; a number of equally solid economic journalists; and a few people who don’t fall into standard categories, but are by no means the kind of shallow operator Brooks describes. Mike Konczal at Next New Deal, for example, doesn’t fit any of the old categories, but does utterly serious and important work. Well, and there’s Zero Hedge, but it’s an imperfect world.

Does this new, amorphous system work? Yes! In just the past few years we’ve had what I’d consider three classic economic debates–on the effects of monetary expansion at the zero lower bound, on fiscal multipliers and austerity, on the effects of high debt ratios; the emergence of major new themes involving issues like private-sector leverage and the need for safe assets; and more, all strongly informed by data…. So don’t feel nostalgic for the days of authority figures dominating the discourse. Intellectually, in economics at least, these are the good old days.