|Peter Boettke|
I find John Cassidy always worth reading, even though I agree with very little he has to say. He is a very good writer, and he cares passionately about the topics on which he writes. But his theoretical grasp, I would argue, is not really there and he has several blind spots. Still, if you want to get a grip on the intellectual priors of a left of center thinker, who is genuinely disciplined by the highest standards of journalism, then I really don't think you can find a better person to read.
His interviews in The New Yorker on Chicago economics are very illuminating, his older essays, such as this one on F. A. Hayek, are well worth reading, and his book How Markets Fail is well written, and well argued from the perspective that Cassidy holds. But in all of these, his blind-spots and limited grasp of the theoretical and empirical issues become more and more obvious as the conversations strive to get more sophisticated.
His latest New York Review of Books contribution follows this general pattern. His basic argument is that the utopian economics of the mainstream is now thoroughly discredited, but somehow we haven't completely yet unshackled our policy making from this dogma. He even claims that Europeans suffer from a good dose of "American free market dogmatism".
I must confess that when I read these words, I actually don't understand what world we both are occupying. I am reminded of my reaction in the early 1990s when I read a passage in a book by Alice Amsden (The Market Meets Its Match) that it was the dogmatic ideas of Mises and Hayek that dominated the thinking of the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s onward. Both Cassidy and Amsden see the world in almost the diametrically opposite position from that which I hold. How can they see free market dogma, in a world full of interventionism? How can they continue to blame the free market for the social ills we are confronted with when the free market is not what we have in policy practice? During the 2000s, e.g., we had an administration whose first act in public policy was protection of the steel industry, and last act was TARP, and in between engaged in discretionary spending unmatched since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
But my confusion isn't limited to my reading of heterodox thinkers whether journalists or professors of political economy, it also results in reading many economists whose work I have valued very highly in the past for its penetrating analysis of markets and institutions. Simon Johnson is perhaps the most shocking example of this. The Simon Johnson who I read on the Soviet system and the transition from communism, and the Simon Johnson who I read in the "institutions rule" debate, and the Simon Johnson I read at The Baseline Scenario are not the same economist. Why?
What are my blind-spots and where do I exhibit limited grasp of the theory and the evidence?
