How Solow Can You Go?

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

11/25/12

 

The current issue of The New Republic has a long attack on Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and free market economics generally by the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow, entitled “Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics.” Ostensibly a review of the brand new book The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression by Angus Burgin, the review is less about the book than it is an excuse for Solow to vent his complaints against the more popular Friedman and Hayek. (That TNR intends it as a hit piece is seen from the unattractive photos TNR chose to use with the online version of the article.)

 

It really chafes his chaps that people like Hayek and Friedman receive such attentiveness from biographers while no one ever writes books about Solow, or Galbraith, or Samuelson. And Solow works overtime to heap scorn on the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the intellectual organization Hayek helped to found in the late 1940s that became a leading node for reviving free market thought. And Solow employs one of the oldest tricks in the book, trying to divine a “good Hayek” from a “bad Hayek,” which is what you do when you want to marginalize the uncongenial findings of an intellectual that are impossible to dismiss.

 

It’s even worse than that when you think about it for a moment. While conservative intellectuals, office holders (think of Paul Ryan, or Michele Bachmann, who cited Ludwig von Mises as an influence in her thinking), grassroots Tea Party activists all speak openly of the their fondness for Hayek and Friedman, when was the last time you heard a liberal—any kind of liberal—express excitement over or attribute inspiration from a liberal economist—even Keynes? Does anybody still read John Kenneth Galbraith? Does any real human being anywhere say, “Oooh, Paul Samuelson! He’s my hero!” Does anyone still read the economist who was the co-winner of the Nobel Prize along with Hayek in 1974? (Anyone know who it was? Bueller? Bueller? It was Myrdal . . . Gunnar Myrdal.) Is there any equivalent organization to the Mont Pelerin Society for liberal economists? If there is, I’m unaware of it. (Offering the American Economic Association is cute, but doesn’t count.) Yes, liberals love Paul Krugman, but not for his economic scholarship. Can anyone at MSNBC name a single economic concept of Krugman’s? (Higher income tax rates don’t count. Heck, Krugman hasn’t even bothered to come up with his own curve on a restaurant napkin.)

 

(Snip)