Sunday, July 19, 2009

A Reuters Reporter Finally Catches Up With Bob Murphy

A Reuters reporter today:

Basically, Greg Mankiw is just about the least interesting economics blogger out there. I always know where he’s going to come down on an issue, and I never learn anything from his explanations of why he winds up at that position.


Bob Murphy many months ago:

I've always thought Greg Mankiw's blog was pretty useless, since he basically links to other things with one-liners.
As for me, I think the one man textbook factory is just generally wrong on many topics he addresses. He doesn't want to rock any boats. The lucre is just too damn good.

1 comment:

  1. Wenzel,

    Exactly. I actually said the same thing Murphy did when I started arguing with Mankiw on his blog several years ago. But I didn't blog about the exp on MY blog, so I have no record to point to so I can say "FIRST!" so... bravo Bob (M.).

    I've been discussing this a lot with a friend of mine (fellow traveler on the road to revolution, let's just say). Between the two of us, we've been having a lot of conversations with high level people (F500 execs and other "high-powered" individuals like that) and we've been realizing that most of these people just don't care about how effed up things are because, as you said, the "lucre is too damn good," and they don't want to rock the boat. The risks are many-- rocking the boat doesn't succeed, and they're targeted for retribution, or rocking the boat leads to something worse and they get blamed, or even simpler, they rock the boat and get scolded because that's not their job, which they then promptly lose.

    Do you have any ideas or strategies for how to overcome this or who to target? I was thinking it's the intellectuals, but the intellectuals have much more at stake than anyone else so they have a larger incentive to not change their viewpoint (like F500 execs). But the mass of people are too stupid, too hurried in keeping up with their own lives and too diffuse to count on to demand change. Not to mention they're truly powerless (democracy, heh).

    Thoughts?

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