Brad DeLong reminds us of Eugene Fama’s remarkable (in the worst way) claim that stimulus can’t work as a matter of logic. It was actually that claim, and its endorsement by John Cochrane , that led me to the realization that we were living in a dark age of macroeconomics.
This is, I suppose, the kind of thing that leads some people to accuse me of being uncivil and engaging in ad hominem attacks. I guess we’re supposed to be respectful when economists resurrect fallacies that were corrected three generations ago, and present those fallacies as new and important insights. But I don’t have it in me to do that, especially when those resurrected fallacies are being used to confuse public discussion in a time of economic crisis, when it matters a great deal whether we have the right policy response.