Schumpeter Is Insensitive
I’m working on lectures for my History of Economic Thought courses for Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom (I will blast out the details once they’re all up–very soon now!), and this passage from Schumpeter cracked me up:
I do not think that Ricardo ever did much historical reading. But this is not what I mean [in the text above]. The trouble with him is akin to the trouble I have, in this respect, with my American students, who have plenty of historical material pushed down their throats. But it is to no purpose. They lack the historical sense that no amount of factual study can give. This is why it is so much easier to make theorists of them than economists. [Italics original.]
— Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 472, footnote 2.
Sums up the entire Keynesian project.