The Economists Have it Out

I spent 30 mins of my very precious time (I'm not claiming to be high and mighty, just that given my recent work load that's directly 30 mins of my sleep time) to read about the all-out-war among economists, started by a NYT article written by Paul Krugman (How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?), and followed by John Cochrane's and David Levine's responses.

There are actually many more ripples caused by Krugman's article -- just do a simple google search and you'll have more than you'll ever wanna read.

I'm clearly not in a real position to respond, given that I don't know much about macroeconomics, and that I'm nowhere near where all these guys are in terms of accomplishment. I'll just give my humble two cents:

1. To be honest, I've lost most of my respect for Krugman since he's gone "mainstream." Call it my obsession for the beauty of mathematics, he has basically just gone "intuitive" with all of his arguments -- which, don't get me wrong, given his intellect he still convinces most people -- and the formal logical arguments are muddled and unclear at best, and the premise in which the arguments are made is not any more realistic than the models of the macroeconomists that he so fiercely attacked.
   
2. I don't claim to cure the world of AIDS or feed all starving children in my work -- as a theorist, I only assert that my models have a flavor of and may advance the understanding of how some things work in the real world. I know some macroeconomists go a little wild with data to show that their model works, but even from my very moderate understanding, they are very well aware of their limitations, and there is very far from a consensus even within the neoclassical school.
3. Don't get me started on behavioral guys. I have no problem with behavioral economics per se, but I think that the field as it stands right now is giving itself a bad name. One: the assumption (irrationality) implies all possibilities -- hence you're always right (you gotta be); two: running with this assumption gives you absolutely no predictive power. And from what I understand we're not in the business of story-telling and simply booking-keeping historical events related to economics.
   
4. Calling people names and making personal attacks are just not cool... we're not in kindergarten anymore, and doing so only serves to weaken your arguments