An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion

Lynne Kiesling

Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post this morning at Marginal Revolution:

David Warsh and Paul Krugman try to write Hayek out of the history of macroeconomics. …

It is true that many of Hayek’s specific ideas about business cycles vanished from the mainstream discussion under the Keynesian juggernaut but what Krugman and Warsh miss is that Hayek’s vision of how to think about macroeconomics came back with a vengeance in the 1970s. …

… Hayek was an important inspiration in the modern program to build macroeconomics on microfoundations. The major connecting figure here is Lucas who cites Hayek in some of his key pieces and who long considered himself a kind of Austrian.

I offer this as a cautionary “what not to do” note to students in particular, but also to all of us. In the piece to which Alex is responding Krugman chooses his definition of “modern macroeconomics” in a way that clearly maps into his preconceptions and reflects his confirmation bias. Such a rhetorical stratagem is unscientific and anti-intellectual. It’s also easy to critique (no disrespect intended for Alex’s good, pointed critique) by simply looking at the literature and seeing that modern macro encompasses a breadth of ideas and approaches, many of which are substantially informed by models and methodological approaches that Krugman chooses to reject.

Thus both on intellectual grounds and with a view toward crafting an argument that is persuasive to those who don’t already agree with you and share your worldview, don’t do this. Being more ecumenical and treating the contributions of your intellectual opponents with respect will make your arguments more thorough, effective, and persuasive.

On a substantive note, I’d like to echo the recommendation that Jacob Levy made in the comments on Alex’s post; the conclusion of Warsh’s essay is a good one, and suggests that incorporating more of a complexity approach into macro would enable us to build better models:

That said, it is pleasing to think that Hayek himself may yet turn out to have been a very great economist after all, far more significant than Myrdal or Robinson, when seen against the background of a broader canvas. The proposition that markets are fundamentally evolutionary mechanisms runs through Hayek’s work. Caldwell, of Duke University, notes that, starting with the Constitution of Liberty, “the twin ideas of evolution and spontaneous order” become prominent, especially the idea of cultural evolution, with its emphasis on rules, norms, and decentralization.

These are today lively concepts in laboratories and universities around the world. “It could have been that Hayek was running a different race, and the fact that he didn’t do well in the Walrasian race was that he wasn’t running in it—he was running in the complexity race,” says David Colander, of Middlebury College. Hayek may yet enter history as a prophet of evolutionary economics, a discipline dreamt of since the days of Thorstein Veblen and Alfred Marshall in the late nineteenth century but not yet forged, whose great days lie ahead.

UPDATE: See also Pete Boettke on this same theme, motivated by Alex’s post.

1 thought on “An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion”

  1. Thanks for this contribution Lynne! Interesting to say the least, especially when a huge portion of non-economists who read economics only read Krugman.

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