Being Right Even When Folks Repeatedly Claim You Are Wrong

|Peter Boettke|

Alberto Mingardi graciously discusses my working paper, "The Public Intellectual as Economist: The Case of Henry Hazlitt" in his EconLib post this morning.  Paul Krugman had recently attacked Hazlitt and made the stunning claim that Hazlitt had been wrong about everything he wrote about for over 80 years.  Both Mingardi and I disagree adamantly with that assessment needless to say.

The paper Mingardi references has been revised and is now a co-authored paper with Liya Palagashvili (who will spend the upcoming academic year as a visiting scholar in NYU's economics department) and is forthcoming in HOPE.   

Hazlitt does in fact belong in the company of other 20th century public intellectuals that were original thinkers in the social and policy sciences such as his friends Walter Lippmann and Lewis Mumford.  His contributions ranged wide and deep.  Besides his obvious abilities to explain basic economics to his readers, his books such as Thinking as a Science as well as The Anatomy of Criticism reflect an imaginative and penetrating mind.  Outside of basic economics my favorite work of Hazlitt's is The Foundations of Morality.  But Hazlitt also published a book on The Wisdom of the Stoics.

I disagree with many things Paul Krugman writes, but I mostly object to his intellectual attitude as reflected in essays such as "Knaves, Fools, and me" --- perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence in the case against Krugman as a serious intellectual suffering from confirmation bias and shortsightedness in political economy.  This attitude is reflected in his summary dismisal of Henry Hazlitt -- a journalist with a career that spanned most of the 20th century and included appointments with the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The New York Times, and Newsweek.  It would do well for Krugman to read a little Hazlitt, and perhaps he should look up Paul Samuelson's own interactions with Hazlitt (from the Hazlitt archives) as a model of intellectual engagement.  In a letter to Hazlitt dated September 15, 1966, Samuelson told Hazlitt about how as a college student at U of Chicago in the 1930s  he was assigned an article by Hazlitt on the nature of economic argument.  The article made a lasting impression on the young Samuelson and as he wrote to Hazlitt: "one of the reasons I decided to go into economics was reading your article."

Not only is civility possible between intellectual opponents, but so is gracious recongition of the insights and talents that your oppponents possess.

Comments

[Rafe Champion]

That was very generous of Samuelson, if only he could have been equally civil about Friedman and von Mises! Hazlitt made an impression on the not so young Karl Popper: he reviewed "The Open Society and its Enemies" and gave it a big tick apart from some of the economics. Popper wrote a letter to Hazlitt which is reproduced in "After the Open Society" eds Shearmur and Turner, saying he had revised his ideas on the desirability of full employment.

I probably should mention that the latest volume of Critical Rationalist Papers is "Karl Popper and the Austrian Economists". Published last week, with a five star ecological rating, it is made from recycled electrons!

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=rafe+champion