A commentator at Noahpinion used it and got it on the nose. Here SW was peevishly arguing about the Minneapolis Fed firings and dissing Noah Smith's answer to SW's previous Noah 'smackdown.'
"Wow. An all-night bender. Both inebriation and negotiation. Dude, get over it already and get back to Krugman envy."
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/noah-smackdown-watch-minneapolis.html#comment-form
I would happily name this commentator but they went the 'anonymous' route which is perhaps appropriate as Mark Sadowski observed that a lot of commentators over at SW call themselves 'anon.'
I've gotten some great coinages from commentators at different blogs lately. Daniel over at Money Illusion was still my favorite: Monetary Offset as 'code of letting poor people starve.' He wasn't trying to be helpful but it's a keeper.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/12/dont-tell-sumner-does-outrage-over.html
SW seems to be quibbling in much of this. Noah Smith is somehow being sloppy by speaking of Ellen McGrattan as being 'fired.' Technically she wasn't but she herself sees this as nothing but a technical distinction. Yet SW won't let it go.
"No contract. This is just a normal employment relationship. You're notified of your salary every year, just like anyplace else. But, no contract. No non-renewal. Ellen, if she had chosen to, could be working at the Minneapolis Fed on January 1."
SW is pretty fired up over this whole thing as Noah points out but SW of course claims, no, there are no feelings involved with him, just cool scientific logic for him.
"In terms of what you have written in this post, you just haven't got it. Here, you've mischaracterized my motives, as if I'm driven by anger and emotion. I've thought about these issues carefully, and gone to some effort to try to correctly characterize what is going on. You seem to be embedded in some fantasy wrestling match world of smackdowns, good guys, bad guys, winners, and losers. "
Right, he saves the anger and emotion for when he discusses Krugman. Meanwhile, Nick Rowe declares himself now actually convinced that there is something more to the 'saltwater-freshwater' divide than he had previously thought.
"Before that episode, I thought that the freshwater/saltwater distinction wasn't really a useful one any more, because it was only a difference in degree, and not a big difference at that."
"After that episode, I realised there was a big difference in kind. It's not about microfoundations (which is mostly a difference in degree). It's something else. Those economists who can't see any problems with the idea that if the central bank wants to increase inflation it simply has to set a higher nominal interest rate are on a different planet, where Wicksell never existed."
"The freshwater/saltwater distinction (if that is what it is) is bigger than I thought it was."
"But I think the division we highlighted is very real. You don't see papers like this unless there is serious academic disagreement. For more on the Freshwater/Saltwater division, Williamson should check out "New Classicals and Keynesians, or the Good Guys and the Bad Guys," the NBER working paper by Robert Barro. The division is not as intense as in the 80s when Barro wrote that paper, but the notion that it has disappeared seems highly dubious. See also Williamson's own blog post, "New Keynesians and New Monetarists".
"Wow. An all-night bender. Both inebriation and negotiation. Dude, get over it already and get back to Krugman envy."
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/noah-smackdown-watch-minneapolis.html#comment-form
I would happily name this commentator but they went the 'anonymous' route which is perhaps appropriate as Mark Sadowski observed that a lot of commentators over at SW call themselves 'anon.'
I've gotten some great coinages from commentators at different blogs lately. Daniel over at Money Illusion was still my favorite: Monetary Offset as 'code of letting poor people starve.' He wasn't trying to be helpful but it's a keeper.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/12/dont-tell-sumner-does-outrage-over.html
SW seems to be quibbling in much of this. Noah Smith is somehow being sloppy by speaking of Ellen McGrattan as being 'fired.' Technically she wasn't but she herself sees this as nothing but a technical distinction. Yet SW won't let it go.
"No contract. This is just a normal employment relationship. You're notified of your salary every year, just like anyplace else. But, no contract. No non-renewal. Ellen, if she had chosen to, could be working at the Minneapolis Fed on January 1."
SW is pretty fired up over this whole thing as Noah points out but SW of course claims, no, there are no feelings involved with him, just cool scientific logic for him.
"In terms of what you have written in this post, you just haven't got it. Here, you've mischaracterized my motives, as if I'm driven by anger and emotion. I've thought about these issues carefully, and gone to some effort to try to correctly characterize what is going on. You seem to be embedded in some fantasy wrestling match world of smackdowns, good guys, bad guys, winners, and losers. "
Right, he saves the anger and emotion for when he discusses Krugman. Meanwhile, Nick Rowe declares himself now actually convinced that there is something more to the 'saltwater-freshwater' divide than he had previously thought.
"Before that episode, I thought that the freshwater/saltwater distinction wasn't really a useful one any more, because it was only a difference in degree, and not a big difference at that."
"After that episode, I realised there was a big difference in kind. It's not about microfoundations (which is mostly a difference in degree). It's something else. Those economists who can't see any problems with the idea that if the central bank wants to increase inflation it simply has to set a higher nominal interest rate are on a different planet, where Wicksell never existed."
"The freshwater/saltwater distinction (if that is what it is) is bigger than I thought it was."
I see that Smith stuck to his guns here on the divide and rightly so-it's real.
Williamson complains that Miles and I paint the divisions in macro with too broad of a brush (or, as he puts it, we hurl paint at the canvas and call it a day). This is probably true but unavoidable. We took great pains to make our article as nuanced as we possibly could. Personally I think we did a pretty good job of being nuanced. And you should see the amount of nuance that the editors cut out!
"But I think the division we highlighted is very real. You don't see papers like this unless there is serious academic disagreement. For more on the Freshwater/Saltwater division, Williamson should check out "New Classicals and Keynesians, or the Good Guys and the Bad Guys," the NBER working paper by Robert Barro. The division is not as intense as in the 80s when Barro wrote that paper, but the notion that it has disappeared seems highly dubious. See also Williamson's own blog post, "New Keynesians and New Monetarists".
I see this claim of SW that there is no divide and that the only ones claiming it are some troublesome 'journalists' looking for a fight-of course, the 'jounralists' he has in mind are Krugman, et. al-as similar to when Neoclassical economists claim there's no such thing as Neoclassical economics.
Williamson's main implicit point is that Krugman has become a shlock economist since he writes for the NYT. So yeah, it is totally about schools of thoughts in macro with the key difference being that the Keynesian camp acknowledges that there are some moronic economists out there whereas the Neoclassical camp claims that there are no Keynesians, that all the Keynesians are NewKeynesian and thus pseudo-classical or that the Keynesians are stupid or whatever (this is an obvious variation of Freud's borrowed kettle).
ReplyDeleteSo the funny thing is that even without knowing anything about economics you could tell that Williamson is a liar.
Well I guess that's a compliment. I guess I'm like Socrates-I don't know much but I know this which gives me one advantage. I think part of it is that I use something that Freshwater guys like SW claim is useless in econ: intuition.
ReplyDeletehttp://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/12/tony-yates-inside-mind-of-your-average.html