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[Note from the moderator: This message was posted on Friday and 
mysteriously made it to the archives but not to the subscribers. Apologies 
for possible multiple postings. -- E-MS] 
 
Bradley Bateman writes of "Petur Jonsson's ability to neglect much 
..... [in] his rush to characterize people's aims in his own 
convenient, but inaccurate, reconstruction." Although I am most 
gratified to see that Bateman takes due note of this ability, modesty 
propels me to admit that I did not really set out to rewrite "the 
discussions from last fall." Hence all the credit for serendipitously 
noticing that such a reconstruction had indeed taken place must go to 
Bateman himself. What I had actually set out to do was simply to write 
down some thoughts that came to me as I was rereading the debate ex 
post facto from the HES archives. In fact, I thought I was trying to 
change the subject a bit. 
 
As for my "thinly veiled sneer" and my "sneer ... about historical 
arguments" and my "unfortunate sneer." Alas, what I meant to produce 
was a grin. Certainly nothing worse than a smirk, although I must 
confess feeling a bit mischievous as I wrote my little note. Perhaps I 
was too prankish. But then, what reaction could be more gratifying 
than the sincere irritation displayed by Bateman in his response? 
Thank you, thank you, thank you! And by the way it was "the style of 
women's hats" not "women's hair fashions". 
 
But, on a more serious note, Bateman also writes: 
 
"I would think that a history of monetarism that looked at the 
inflation of the 1970's, the political position of the central banks 
that adopted monetarist targeting, the public perception of 
Keynesianism's failure, the instability of velocity in the 1980's 
(worldwide), the subsequent abandonment of monetarism, and the many 
self-contortions of monetarists in the face of empirical evidence that 
subverted their positions would be a much more useful history for 
professional economists than a rehashing of who thought that the IS-LM 
apparatus should or shouldn't be jettisoned." 
 
In this passage Bateman makes my point. Without an understanding of 
how and why Brunner set out to discredit what he sometimes called the 
"islamic" framework, it is simply not possible to make any sense of 
the rest of it. I was not suggesting that social, political, and 
cultural issues as well as fashions and trends are unimportant. 
Sometimes they may well be the key to grasping the how and why of 
economic arguments from a different past. But, suggesting that we do 
not need to understand the core of the theory itself is not only 
laying it on "thick," it is downright flat-out crackpotism. If we do 
not understand the theory, then debating its historical context makes 
about as much sense as arguing about whether the moon is blue because 
it is made of Roquefort or Danish Blue. 
 
Petur O. Jonsson 
Department of Economics and Finance 
Fayetteville State University 
 
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