This beat down of the 'Chris Rufo of economic history' is necessary work. Kill fraud at the source because we'll likely hear PM's screed uncritically referred to at the next round of school board meetings, county councils, media (name your culture war venue) etc. "which was published in the prestigious JPE" Thank you for your service.
Subscribed for a year after this post. I'm an econ person and was surprised with that paper's publication in a prestigious journal. I figure you're not surprised at all. Thanks for making its issues salient.
It is notable that the acknowledgments to the article show that it didn’t pass through a single decent historian of economic thought’s hands. Or if it did, none would agree to have their name attached. I would not be very surprised if Uhlig circumvented the regular peer review process—you should ask Magness to show the peer review reports.
It’s always gotta be fucking economists (I say, as an economist). Something about taking like three semesters of statistics makes these people think they can just roll into any other discipline and reveal truths its own scholars are too blind to see, and nevermind understanding what you’re talking about.
This seems to be an rather academic, inside-baseball dispute. It's always important to set the record straight, but Phil Magness seems too obscure a figure to waste time on. This type of public disagreement is not why I read Unpopular Front. That said, I find John's lack of hesitation in directly and publicly rebutting Magness admirable. However, the whole question seems better suited to an academic journal.
I would not ordinarily bother to point out a typo, but this one is significant. You write "Marianne Weber, Marx’s wife" when clearly you mean "Max's wife." Excuse my pettifogging.
There is also the point that anybody that people are rejecting in whole or in part is not obscure, unknown or unimportant. E.g., the strong motte-and-bailey version of their claim is that Marx was obscure and unimportant before the Russian Revolution, but you can't survey the period between 1880 and 1917 and note historians, biographers and philosophers agreeing that Marx and Marxist thought were rejected by "the majority of Englishmen" or among economists etc. without conceding in some sense that Marx was in fact not at all obscure or unknown. Lack of adoption is not lack of importance--you wouldn't be able to talk about people refusing or rejecting Marx if they had never heard of the guy.
Such a weird argument that guy is trying to make. You know you've made it if people don't directly cite you. In library librarianship we have something called the 5 laws. They're by Ranganathan but no one cites the lectures in which he discussed them. They're just Ranganathan's laws or the 5 laws of library science. It's like he's overly motivated by h indexes.
“...the irony here is that the Bolsheviks were in fact a relatively minor tendency within the larger context of European Marxism up until the Revolution. The knock on Marxism from radical proletarians was often that it was too parliamentary, too reformist, too political.”
^^^important to remember; the Bolsheviks emerged from a faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Now why would radical Marxists in pre-revolutionary Russia have a party with a name like that? Unless, of course, they were consciously placing themselves within an existing European tradition of Marxist (or at least partially Marxist) political parties/factions/organizations who used words like “Social Democratic” and “Labour” in their names....
Today, a political party with that name would be associated with a broader center-left tendency. Or, perhaps, the name would be a sick joke, e.g. Russia’s own Liberal Democratic Party.
What does the endgame of a Twitter beef look like? This dude's thing seems so fundamentally dishonest, and he has several books and a professorship--has anyone ever caved and admitted they were wrong?
This is one of the most powerful examples of someone just flat-out refusing to take the L and move on.
This beat down of the 'Chris Rufo of economic history' is necessary work. Kill fraud at the source because we'll likely hear PM's screed uncritically referred to at the next round of school board meetings, county councils, media (name your culture war venue) etc. "which was published in the prestigious JPE" Thank you for your service.
Subscribed for a year after this post. I'm an econ person and was surprised with that paper's publication in a prestigious journal. I figure you're not surprised at all. Thanks for making its issues salient.
It is notable that the acknowledgments to the article show that it didn’t pass through a single decent historian of economic thought’s hands. Or if it did, none would agree to have their name attached. I would not be very surprised if Uhlig circumvented the regular peer review process—you should ask Magness to show the peer review reports.
It’s always gotta be fucking economists (I say, as an economist). Something about taking like three semesters of statistics makes these people think they can just roll into any other discipline and reveal truths its own scholars are too blind to see, and nevermind understanding what you’re talking about.
This seems to be an rather academic, inside-baseball dispute. It's always important to set the record straight, but Phil Magness seems too obscure a figure to waste time on. This type of public disagreement is not why I read Unpopular Front. That said, I find John's lack of hesitation in directly and publicly rebutting Magness admirable. However, the whole question seems better suited to an academic journal.
I would not ordinarily bother to point out a typo, but this one is significant. You write "Marianne Weber, Marx’s wife" when clearly you mean "Max's wife." Excuse my pettifogging.
That guy is so unbelievable, thanks for taking it on John. It's impossible to look away!
You are cursed with the gift of polemic.
There is also the point that anybody that people are rejecting in whole or in part is not obscure, unknown or unimportant. E.g., the strong motte-and-bailey version of their claim is that Marx was obscure and unimportant before the Russian Revolution, but you can't survey the period between 1880 and 1917 and note historians, biographers and philosophers agreeing that Marx and Marxist thought were rejected by "the majority of Englishmen" or among economists etc. without conceding in some sense that Marx was in fact not at all obscure or unknown. Lack of adoption is not lack of importance--you wouldn't be able to talk about people refusing or rejecting Marx if they had never heard of the guy.
Such a weird argument that guy is trying to make. You know you've made it if people don't directly cite you. In library librarianship we have something called the 5 laws. They're by Ranganathan but no one cites the lectures in which he discussed them. They're just Ranganathan's laws or the 5 laws of library science. It's like he's overly motivated by h indexes.
“...the irony here is that the Bolsheviks were in fact a relatively minor tendency within the larger context of European Marxism up until the Revolution. The knock on Marxism from radical proletarians was often that it was too parliamentary, too reformist, too political.”
^^^important to remember; the Bolsheviks emerged from a faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Now why would radical Marxists in pre-revolutionary Russia have a party with a name like that? Unless, of course, they were consciously placing themselves within an existing European tradition of Marxist (or at least partially Marxist) political parties/factions/organizations who used words like “Social Democratic” and “Labour” in their names....
Today, a political party with that name would be associated with a broader center-left tendency. Or, perhaps, the name would be a sick joke, e.g. Russia’s own Liberal Democratic Party.
Who must go? Magnes must go!
What does the endgame of a Twitter beef look like? This dude's thing seems so fundamentally dishonest, and he has several books and a professorship--has anyone ever caved and admitted they were wrong?
"Marianne Weber, Marx’s wife" should be changed to "Max's wife" before you engender a 3 part essay about how you get basic historical facts wrong.