>After reading the following posting by Rod I could not help 
>imagining what post-modern scholars in other disciplines must 
>say about articles written in the American Economics Review. 
> 
 
Yup. It's highly _unfriendly_ for the _AER_ to be written as it is. (And, 
indeed, wasn't the _Journal_of_Economic_Perspectives_ started to be a 
journal that is readable by _economists_?) 
 
It's a device of intellectual closure: make the barriers to trying to 
understand what someone is trying to do so hard that no one does--and as a 
result one's publications (and faculty slots) are immune from criticism... 
 
It's also a cause of an enormous loss of mindshare on issues of economic 
policy: a generation ago Newsweek's economic columnists were Paul Samuelson 
and Milton Friedman. That's not true today... 
 
Brad De Long 
 
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing 
the quantity theory of money] is probably       | 
<[log in to unmask]> 
true.... But this **long run** is a misleading  | Brad De Long 
guide to current affairs. **In the long run**   | Dept. of Economics 
we are all dead.  Economists set themselves     | U.C. Berkeley 
too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous  | Berkeley, CA 94720 
seasons they can only tell us that when the     | (510) 643-4027  376-1362 
storm is long past the ocean is flat again."    | (510) 642-6615 fax 
                                --J.M. Keynes   | 
http://econ158.berkeley.edu/