Simon Wren-Lewis says most of what needs to be said in response to Tony Yates. But I think it’s important to highlight the self-destructiveness of the attitude on display.

Consider the state of the debate over economic policy in 2009-2010. On one side you had economists who understood and took seriously simple macro models – extended versions of IS-LM with endogenous money, and various New Keynesian models designed mainly to show how IS-LMish results can be consistent with constrained maximization. On the other you had people who did macroeconomics not by models but via slogans and gut feelings.

The lay side of this debate looked at budget deficits and “money printing” (the expansion of the central bank balance sheet) and issued dire warnings about soaring interest rates and inflation. The other side said no, we’re at the zero lower bound, so none of this will happen. And these predictions – which the non-economists considered completely implausible and absurd – proved correct.

If economics were an ordinary field of scholarly inquiry, this outcome would have been celebrated as proof that we really do know something useful. (I personally was deeply gratified at the demonstration that I have not been fooling myself all these years.)

But no. Faced with a triumph of simple models, which made strong, counterintuitive predictions that panned out, a significant number of economists refuse to take yes for an answer; they seek out reasons to insist that things are more complicated than that, even though in practice they weren’t complicated at all, and to declare that the field isn’t ready to offer useful advice. Time for more research!

But surely the question here is why society should support such research. If your view is that after three generations of macroeconomics, the field had nothing helpful to say in the face of a huge economic crisis, why should anyone believe that your research program will ever produce anything useful?

And again: what we see here is a determination to declare that we as a profession have nothing useful to offer in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that we actually do know something.

I’m not sure what this is about. Maybe in part it’s academic distaste for the very notion of emerging from the ivory tower to engage with real concerns. But let me remind my colleagues that nobody has to take economists seriously. If we as a profession are going to squirt out clouds of ink and scuttle for safety whenever anyone suggests a real-world use for our work, what good are we?