By Benn Steil

“Many of the most successful economics blogs promote communication within political groupings, not across them.  On the web you best build an audience by organising a claque and stroking its prejudices.  Extend elaborate courtesy to people you agree with and boorish contempt to those who do not get it.  Celebrate exasperation and incivility as marks of intellectual authenticity – an attitude easier to tolerate in teenagers under hormonal stress than in professors at world-class universities” (Clive Crook, FT February 8, 2009).

Two days before Clive’s column appeared, I experienced firsthand the econoblog treatment he describes.  On February 6, the FT published an op-ed by me (“Keynes and the triumph of hope over economics”) criticising the tendency of economists to invoke Keynes, rather than logic and evidence, in support of any and all forms of new deficit spending, which are now massed together under the cozy umbrella of “stimulus” – a term that closes discussion by simply assuming the merits it claims. Read more