Evening Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Circles of Influence

Paul Krugman: Circles of Influence: “Thomas Palley is upset….

I was reacting to… his claim that mainstreamers like me were looking in all the wrong places…. This wasn’t about intellectual priority–it was about refuting a claim of ideological blindness…. I’m willing to accept that Palley was somewhat ahead of the curve. And it’s… true that… those like me… think of it as an arc from Tobin to Akerlof-Dickens-Perry to Daly and Hobijn…. There’s so much stuff out there, and you have to filter somehow, so you mainly read stuff by people you know and people they tell you are worth reading…. This is a tendency one ought to lean against…. On the other hand, if you want the mainstream guys to listen to you, you probably shouldn’t accuse them of being denser and more rigid than they really are…

Me? I tend to think that if you cannot trace the idea to Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say, Mill, Bagehot, Walras, Wicksell, Keynes, Arrow, or Samuelson, you aren’t trying hard enough. And once you have traced the idea to one of them and cited them, you are safely on base…