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Your "turgid writing" quote from Krugman's NYT blog also brought up the comment thread. Many are slams, some are informative. The one below is droll:
Yes. It took you decades to discover keynes. And that turned out pretty good. If you had discovered it before you would have never won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science. Good for you.


"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon May 9th, 2011 at 11:22:59 PM EST
I was glad to see that Krugman was referring positively to Minsky, Fisher and Keynes. I cannot speak about Minsky, but Fisher's writing is far from turgid and Keynes offers so many insights per page as to make it highly worthwhile to wade through any difficult parts. (Not that I have yet finished The General Theory.) One commenter noted that Minsky's biography of Keynes presented the ideas of both men quite readably. I may order it.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon May 9th, 2011 at 11:30:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I have said before and will say again that, if his assessment of the book was
There's a deep insight in there; both the concept of financial fragility and his insight, way ahead of anyone else, that as the memory of the Depression faded the system was in fact becoming more fragile. But that insight takes up part of Chapter 9. The rest is a long slog through turgid writing, Kaleckian income distribution theory (which I don't think has anything to do with the fundamental point), and more.
then, unfortunately, Krugman didn't get it.

Or maybe it was just that a lot of stuff in the book was known to him from other sources and new to me when I read it...

Economics is politics by other means

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue May 10th, 2011 at 01:36:07 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, if Krugman found Minsky's book turgid, he could find a lucid exposition of his ideas for a non technical audience here.  :-)

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue May 10th, 2011 at 12:15:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And the quotes you supply from Minsky are not exactly examples of turgid writing. But perhaps finding them turgid removes one from the necessity to write things that might remove one from the prized category of Serious PeopleTM  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon May 9th, 2011 at 11:39:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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