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Monday, January 08, 2007

Some Positive Words for Alan Reynolds

I have a link at my blog for Donald Luskin’s website and I love the name: “The Conspiracy to Keep you Poor and Stupid.” In a post yesterday, Luskin has some very powerful words of praise for one of our esteemed contributors, Mr. Alan Reynolds. Income inequality is a liberal shibboleth, one that goes without saying condemns capitalism as a cold, hard-hearted system that liberals must save us form. Mr. Reynolds has obviously done some amazing work to destroy this supposed self-evident truth.

Here’s the first paragraph, but I’m going to be checking out some of the links and resources about the debate he references. So check it out.

In the true spirit of science, in which competing researchers test each other's hypotheses and experiments in search of a higher truth, Alan Reynolds -- author of “Income and Wealth” -- has been doing brilliant work in investigating the widely held hypothesis that income inequality has increased steadily over the last 20 years. Yes, that is just an hypothesis, though it is so widely believed and frequently quoted as to have the air of fact. What makes Reynolds' work so powerful is that he's patiently and systematically demolished the apparent experimental evidence behind that hypothesis, and dared to stand nearly alone against the conventional wisdom of economic science. When it comes to income inequality, Reynolds is a modern Galileo.


High praise indeed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

See here and here for discussion on the other side of the argument. I don't have any particular horse in this race and I'm not all that good at higher end economics. What with information like this though, it seems that there's some discrepancy in income that Dr. Reynolds doesn't account for.

Hunter Baker said...

I once really loved reading Luskin's blog, but then he got into a pissing match with Paul Krugman that simply would not end. Was Krugman compromising his academician card to go totally into the tank against the Bush economic policy? Of course, but after hearing it said a few hundred times I was ready for something else. You've reminded me to go back and check.