>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/