Edified

Just to quickly follow up on the NYRB article. It was really interesting and generally speaking, right on.
I wanted to pick up on one of Freeman's ideas though.

The more important question is whether what Akerlof and Shiller have offered in Animal Spirits amounts to "a theory" in the sense that it could stand in place of the current theories that they criticize for being based entirely on rational responses to economic motives. There is a difference between a series of ideas about different aspects of economic behavior and an integrated account of macroeconomic fluctuations. Akerlof and Shiller are surely on the right track in pointing to elements that are missing from today's conventional models, and in arguing that incorporating them into mainstream macroeconomic analysis would help. But they have neither done this nor shown others how to. Hence their goal of replacing what macroeconomists teach their students is likely to be disappointed, at least for now.

I don't doubt that Freeman's critique is valid--on top of having a Ph.D he also has the additional advantage of having actually read the book. And I'm not so much looking for a bone to pick as I am an idea to flesh out. But maybe the book's lack of specificity on that account, their "silence" as Freeman calls it at the end of the chapter, isn't such a problem. From what I've read about it (I haven't read any of it), Keynes' General Theory is notoriously complicated, vague, even self-contradictory--a kind of bible for economists and economic historians in the flexibility it allows for at times equally contradictory interpretation. But economics is, after all, a social science. Maybe this expectation that theory be both analytically comprehensive and proscriptive is exactly the problem. As Keynes found out, a "series of ideas" that question the existing analytical approach can have a much bigger impact than the most elegant theory.