At times it might be said that a man may become too smart for his own good. This idea could be applied to Ricardo and Malthus. While they had much insight into the study of economics they found a way to detour the entire study into a long and lengthy side trip described in the book as the flow and ebb and flow of knowledge. Using what could be called an “easy excuse,” or “easy write off” of exogenous causes as the reason behind things they did not want to or could not explain.
To describe this they used the example of map making of Africa. How many maps had great detail in the past but while they were detailed, after a time, they were not always correct, completely ignored key facts, and at times were completely false. That it took great time before the maps were able to be brought back to the details and knowledge they once had because certain things were blown out of proportion and others completely ignored.
B for Elgin for "map making of Africa".
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that he really gets the map metaphor though. Let me try again. With old maps of Africa, some things were better (the coast) and some were worse (the interior). As technology allowed the better aspects to be improved, the response to the fact that the worse aspects would be improved with time was not to wait for that, but to completely throw out those worse aspects until they could be completely redone. This was in spite of the fact that they contained many elements of truth.
In economics, this meant that while Smith told stories about both increasing and decreasing returns, and since Malthus and Ricardo were able to show that you could go further with the latter, that the profession stopped thinking seriously about increasing returns. Basically, we lost decades doing what was easy.
BTW: Krugman offered the mapping metaphor that Warsh has adopted. Krugman's books are brilliant and worth reading, no matter how much you dislike his columns.