Several readers sent me links to a Brad DeLong post which they took to be a rebuttal to a takedown I did of a recent Ezra Klein piece.
Since DeLong did not link to or mention my post, I doubt his piece had anything to do with mine. But his post is noteworthy for a completely different reason: it illustrates how economists have refused to learn much, if anything, from the crisis. And in some ways, I feel bad about taking DeLong to task on this. He’s been far more willing than the overwhelming majority of mainstream economists to admit how seriously he and the profession got things wrong. And yet he seems unwilling or unable to look hard at conventional thinking in the discipline and free himself of it. DeLong and his colleagues are proving Thomas Kuhn right (I confess to liking Max Planck’s formulation, “Science progresses funeral by funeral.”)
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