Just finished reading john quiggin’s book.

Very technical and hard to determine whether claims are or are not correct.

However it does explain the nature of the debate in the economic blog-o-sphere. The usual decorum your expect in research communities has been dispensed with. People are attacking each other with a level of venom that is shocking.  To see a Nobel prize researcher accuse a professor of Harvard that they are shills for the rich is shocking.

There appears to have been a failure of economic theory. And that failure has discredited many people and their reputations. And that people are trying to build new research programs or trying to salvage their reputation or savage their opponents.

As a partial and ignorant observer of the state of the economics world this is fascinating…

The only tragedy is that while the economists try to figure everything out the rest of us are trying to fix a horrible mess…