====================== HES POSTING ==================== 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 323 School of Business and Economics Fayetteville State University Fayetteville, NC 28301-4298 Phones: 910-486-1984 (Office) 910-425-0424 (Home) E-Mail: [log in to unmask] ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]