{"id":22152,"date":"2013-09-17T07:07:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-17T12:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22152"},"modified":"2013-09-17T07:07:44","modified_gmt":"2013-09-17T12:07:44","slug":"a-brief-history-of-fifty-years-of-american-economic-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/17\/a-brief-history-of-fifty-years-of-american-economic-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"A brief history of fifty years of American economic thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2013\/09\/a-simple-theory-of-recent-american-intellectual-history.html\" target=\"_blank\">Tyler Cowen<\/a> wraps up the rise and fall of &#8220;right&#8221; and &#8220;left&#8221; economics in the US since the 1960s:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the so-called \u201cright wing\u201d was right about virtually everything on the economic front.  Most of all communism, but also inflation, taxes, (most of) deregulation, labor unions, and much more, noting that a big chunk of the right wing blew it on race and some other social issues.  The Friedmanite wing of the right nailed it on floating exchange rates.<\/p>\n<p>Arguably the \u201crightness of the right\u201d peaks around 1989, with the collapse of communism.  After that, the right wing starts to lose its way.<\/p>\n<p>Up through that time, market-oriented economists have more interesting research, more innovative journals, and much else to their credit, culminating in the persona and career of Milton Friedman.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve never heard tales of Paul Samuelson\u2019s MIT colleagues mocking him for his <a href=\"http:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2010\/01\/soviet-growth-american-textbooks.html\" target=\"_blank\">pronouncements<\/a> on Soviet economic growth.  I suspect they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>Starting in the early 1990s, the left wing is better equipped, more scholarly, and also more fun to read.  (What exactly turned them around?)  In the 1990s, the <em>Quarterly Journal of Economics<\/em> is suddenly more interesting and ultimately more influential than the <em>Journal of Political Economy<\/em>, even though the latter retained a higher academic ranking.  The right loses track of what its issues ought to be.  There is <a href=\"http:\/\/econjwatch.org\/issues\/volume-10-issue-2-may-2013\" target=\"_blank\">no real heir to the legacy of Milton Friedman<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tyler Cowen wraps up the rise and fall of &#8220;right&#8221; and &#8220;left&#8221; economics in the US since the 1960s: Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the so-called \u201cright wing\u201d was right about virtually everything on the economic front. Most of all communism, but also inflation, taxes, (most of) deregulation, labor unions, and much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,13],"tags":[263,660,165,118,392,764],"class_list":["post-22152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-usa","tag-1970s","tag-deregulation","tag-inflation","tag-taxes","tag-unions","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Li","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22153,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22152\/revisions\/22153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}