Thursday, March 12, 2009

Boudreaux Worthy Analogy?

A masterful finish to Professor Zingales argument against Keynesianism is perhaps Don Boudreaux good (that is extremely good):
Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow this prescription. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists do exactly this. They tell politicians, who are addicted to spending our money, that government expenditures are good. And they tell consumers, who are affected by severe spending problems, that consuming is good, while saving is bad. In medicine, such behaviour would get you expelled from the medical profession; in economics, it gives you a job in Washington.
Note that in Brad DeLong's part, he acknowledges the numerous giants of the field (most of whom actually study business cycles) who disagree with Keynesian policies as effective stimulators of the economy, and he does so without calling them "ethics free republican hacks." Has he just now realized that, as Zingales points out "...it is hard to find academic papers supporting the idea of a fiscal stimulus." Or does he just think these specific people are not these three things?

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