When he takes off his economist hat and puts on his political commentator hat, he can sometime see something that a mainstream economist would not, and he is definitely a mainstream economist with rather progressive policy goals ... but he is still a mainstream economist.

One of the most pernicious biases of the mathematical modeling economists is that if they do not have a model for something that simple observation will confirm is happening, they enter an effect of "0". The burden of proof is on reality to prove that it ought to be incorporated into the model.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.