You can't tell, with him

"Him" is Brad DeLong.

Among links at Economist's View I find

What Does Economics Need to Learn Next? - Brad DeLong

Okay.

At the link:

What Does Economics Need to Learn Next?

Prospect Magazine: Back to school: top economists on what their subject needs to learn next: Learn to prevent—we’re out of cure:

The crisis and its aftermath showed that the North Atlantic economies could not maintain full employment by following the Keynesian road. The idea that when the private sector sits down the public sector should stand up—that consistent durable prosperity can be achieved by having government step in as a spender of last resort—proved unsustainable.

Whoa! Whose conclusion is that? With DeLong you never know.

His own? Or somebody at Prospect magazine? Now I gotta go look.

Oh good. At Prospect I can

Register today and access any 7 articles on the Prospect’s website for FREE in the next 30 days.. 

Yeah. Thanks. No thanks. I should just close the page, but that would end this post.

Oh, okay. The part I quoted above is part of DeLong's two cents at the Prospect page. There are several others quoted there too. DeLong quotes a bunch of them on his page. More than you wanted to know. More than I wanted to know.

Anyway, it's Brad DeLong's conclusion. DeLong says //

No, I won't repeat it again. But apparently he thinks we were "following the Keynesian road." You know: Deficits be damned.

We did the Keynesian thing and it didn't work, DeLong says. We're out of cure, he says. Our only choice is to prevent the problem from arising again, he says. I guess he's out of ideas.

Shit, he never even had an idea. He was using Keynes's idea.

And I don't know why, if the one idea he thought would work didn't actually work and he has no other ideas, I don't know why he thinks we'll be able to prevent the problem from arising again.

Anyway, he didn't even get to Step One yet. Step One is Understand the problem.


DeLong's buddy Krugman, back in 2010, was saying things like

American households have to bring their debt levels down.

and

I think it’s fair to say that a majority of economists believe that excessive private debt played a key role in getting us into this economic mess, and is playing a key role in preventing us from getting out.

He was right about debt. And it's still true. But more recently Krugman says things like

The problem with private debt is that we have good reason to believe that in very wide-open financial systems people get irrationally exuberant, lending and borrowing to an extent that they eventually realize was excessive — and that there are huge negative externalities when everyone tries to deleverage at once.

So, far as I can tell, Krugman now thinks the problem is exuberance, not debt. He used to know how to fix the problem. Now he doesn't.


Look, it's not complicated. The problem is not excessive "lending and borrowing". The problem is the cost of the debt. If you have to spend money to pay for financing, that's money you don't get to spend on output.

Need I say more?