Must-read: Paul Krugman: “Summarizing the Trialogue”

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Summarizing the Trialogue: “Martin Sandbu has a summary…

…Brad DeLong has excerpts for those without FT Premium access. I have some quibbles, basically amounting to ‘But I’m right in the end!’ But never mind. One important meta-thing… is that discussions like this are… only a possibility thanks to the internet. Getting three well-known policy-oriented economists in the same room with time for a substantive discussion is, as Brad notes, very hard. And to-and-fro discussions in the journals are (a) relatively stiff and formal, (b) v-e-r-y s-l-o-w compared with what just went down…. The web has recreated in a virtual way the kind of coffee house discussions out of which the modern scientific journals emerged, without the necessity of all of us being in London, and drinking incredibly terrible coffee.