Paul Krugman Stoops to a New Low

Paul Krugman today quotes a book reviewer to bash Friedrich Hayek.

Krugman writes:

David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened.

Warsh, under the guise of writing economic opinion, regurgitates whatever pamphlet or book comes across his desk. Warsh doesn't hold opinions for more than the next column, yet this is the commentator that Krugman throws at his readers, as if Warsh has a sound opinion on Hayek, or could even be counted on to form one.

Here is Warsh writing, yesterday:

Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon in history – for a few days, that is, until a couple of students remembered seeing her jump out of the crowd half a mile from the finish.

Something of the sort has been going on recently with the shade of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist, who died in 1992 just short of what would have been his ninety-third birthday, never made false claims for himself – far from it: he knew all too well the loneliness of the long distance runner. And scrupulous work as editor by the late W.W. Bartley, interpreter Bruce Caldwell, and biographer Alan Ebenstein, have made it possible to see the man clear.

But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race.... the fact remains that Hayek just didn’t contribute very much to the development of technical economics.

This is what Warsh wrote in 2007, after reading Bruce Caldwell:.

With the socialist nature of the Russian economy under the new Soviet Union in the 1920s, the topic became more interesting still. And then the Great Depression brought the possibility of planning to the fore in the West, especially in Great Britain. Friedrich von Hayek, in 1935, edited a collection of essays by Continental writers, including the one by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises that had most forcefully broached the issue, all designed to introduce English readers to the controversy: Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies in the Possibility of Socialism.

By then, the argument had acquired a name (“the socialist calculation debate”); various champions (Oscar Lange, Abba Lerner); a good deal of interest in mathematical and quantitative planning techniques under development elsewhere; and, finally, in 1945, a concise statement of the argument against planning (and against formal methods) by Hayek, in “The Use of Knowledge in Society"...

Bruce Caldwell’s intellectual biography of Hayek is indispensable for understanding the Austrian’s contributions to the debate

Here's Warsh in 2006, after reading Peart and Levy:

It was only in the second half of the twentieth century, Peart and Levy write, that classical doctrines gradually were reclaimed from “the vanity of the philosophers,” in the works of Friedrich Hayek, George Orwell, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises and others. “...Previous attacks on consumer sovereignty were fought off handily enough — Maurice Dobb by Abba Lerner, John Kenneth Galbraith by Hayek.

Warsh wrote this just six weeks ago, after reading still another book:

The book [Grand Minds, Beautiful Pursuits] really takes off when it becomes a quartet in which Fisher, Keynes, Schumpeter and Hayek debate the lesson of the 1920s and prescribe measures to end the Great Depression.

Got that? Warsh writing about the debate that Krugman says Warsh says didn't happen.

Bottom line: Warsh is a goof. You can find anything you want in his book reviews writings. Only Krugman would use this guy for support on any argument.