GLOBALIZE THIS!: February 2006

Greatest Twentieth-Century Economists

The results are in, according to those responding to the Post-Austitic Economiscs Review poll:

1. John Maynard Keynes 3,253
2. Joseph Alois Schumpeter 1,080
3. John Kenneth Galbraith 904
4. Amartya Sen 708
5. Joan Robinson 607
6. Thorsten Veblen 591
7. Michal Kalecki 481
8. Friedrich Hayek 469
9. Karl Polanyi 456
10. Piero Sraffa 383

Who are these dudes (and lone dudette)? The good people at the New School provide us this handy guide to the history of economic thought.

Surprisingly, given the sample of those likely to follow PAE:

13. Milton Freidman 319
13. Paul Samuelson 319
17. Herbert Simon 250
18. Ronald Coase 246
26. Douglas North 138
30. Ludwig von Mises 78
37. Gary Becker 58
43. James Buchanan 49
58. Robert Lucas 32

These were my top picks, followed by their rankings in the poll and votes:

1. John Maynard Keynes (1, 3253)
2. Raul Prebisch (27, 102)
3. Albert Hirschman (21, 208)
4. Robert Heilbronner (38, 57)
5. Samuel Bowles (78, 20)

Admittedly, after Keynes, it's hard to ordinally rank the rest, and I was loathe to leave out Polanyi, Schumpeter, and Joan Robinson among others. Admittedly, many people probably would not consider Hirschman or Heilbronner economists, but I guess that tells you what I think about where the discipline is going.

TIME TO GET OUT YOUR RATTLIN' SABERS

Chalk this up to more unfinished first term business for the Presidnet pro tem. Despite all the fan fare over China's announcement last summer that it would break from it's long-held peg to the US$.

Am I seeing double?

So Secretary Snow is up in arms, again, brandishing his rattlin' saber. FT.com:

John Snow, US Treasury secretary, hinted strongly last week that his department was likely formally to accuse China of being a “currency manipulator” in its next report on trade and exchange rates, saying the regime that Beijing introduced last summer had not led to greater flexibility.

But don't worry China, he won't be rattling too hard:

Treasury officials have sounded out investors and Wall Street traders on the possibility of branding China a currency manipulator in the next instalment of the twice-yearly report on currencies, required under the 1988 Trade Act.

Wall Street likes the strong dollar (makes it easier to colonize foreign financial systems) not to mention liquidity in the benchmark 30 yr treasury bond market.