I would also note that I do not have the intellect or ego of Keynes, so you are unlikely to find anything either as intelligent or as critical on this blog 😛

Also I don’t think I was anti-stimulus enough in the post – I should have said large stimulus instead of stimulus. I will change that now 🙂

Keynes misrepresented his peers in this way, and it’s a consistent theme in the literature, and I even ran into it in an exchange this week with another economist. For many, this “straw man” it taken as a fact of the matter about non-Keynesian economics.

Keynes represents himself as the rival to “full employment” economics — which no-body every suggested was anything but a first-step theoretical construction for understanding the ordered structure of the economy. But in the hands of Keynes and many since, the dishonest canard has been current that this construction wasn’t a construction, but represented the “faith” of the model constructor in “the market as perfectly self-correcting.”

Keynes represented this non-existent “extreme” as the _norm_ among his peers, and many, many economists since have mistakenly taken Keynes’ word for it.

I note that you are not one of them.

Keynes misrepresented his peers in this way, and it’s a consistent theme in the literature, and I even ran into it in an exchange this week with another economist. For many, this “straw man” it taken as a fact of the matter about non-Keynesian economics.

Keynes represents himself as the rival to “full employment” economics — which no-body every suggested was anything but a first-step theoretical construction for understanding the ordered structure of the economy. But in the hands of Keynes and many since, the dishonest canard has been current that this construction wasn’t a construction, but represented the “faith” of the model constructor in “the market as perfectly self-correcting.”

Keynes represented this non-existent “extreme” as the _norm_ among his peers, and many, many economists since have mistakenly taken Keynes’ word for it.

I note that you are not one of them.

Since I was naming the two EXTREMES of course they are “straw men”. Notice that I didn’t even put anyone in that camp, I just named the extreme point that could occur.

My point wasn’t to say that these extremes were wrong – just that the extremes differ in terms of value judgments, and that these judgments that are sometimes not put out in the open for everyone to look at.

If I had said all of X believe that the market is perfectly correcting and that is “silly” you could pull me up for an oversimplistic straw man argument – but I don’t think that is the case here 🙂

BTW its Matt not Mark 🙂

Mark wrote:

“those selling the market as perfectly self-correcting.”