Rewriting of History is “what seems to be happening”

The latest from Paul Krugman:

“what’s going on here, I think, is a fairly desperate attempt to claim that the Great Recession and its aftermath somehow prove that Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor were right in the Cambridge controversies of the 1960s. It’s a huge non sequitur, even if you think they were indeed right (which you shouldn’t.) But that’s what seems to be happening.”

In addition to claiming they don’t misunderstand banking, what we’re now seeing is a complete rewriting of the history books.  Paul Samuelson, a key player in the Cambridge Capital Controversy ADMITTED that Robinson and Kaldor were right:

“We wish to make it clear for the record that the nonreswitching theorem associated with us is definitely false.”

Or as Edwin Burmesiter noted:

“It is important, for the record, to recognize that key participants in the debate openly admitted their mistakes. Samuelson’s seventh edition of Economics was purged of errors. Levhari and Samuelson published a paper which began, ‘We wish to make it clear for the record that the nonreswitching theorem associated with us is definitely false. We are grateful to Dr. Pasinetti…’ (Levhari and Samuelson 1966). Leland Yeager and I jointly published a note acknowledging his earlier error and attempting to resolve the conflict between our theoretical perspectives. (Burmeister and Yeager, 1978).

However, the damage had been done, and Cambridge, UK, ‘declared victory’: Levhari was wrong, Samuelson was wrong, Solow was wrong, MIT was wrong and therefore neoclassical economics was wrong. As a result there are some groups of economists who have abandoned neoclassical economics for their own refinements of classical economics. In the United States, on the other hand, mainstream economics goes on as if the controversy had never occurred. Macroeconomics textbooks discuss ‘capital’ as if it were a well-defined concept — which it is not, except in a very special one-capital-good world (or under other unrealistically restrictive conditions). The problems of heterogeneous capital goods have also been ignored in the ‘rational expectations revolution’ and in virtually all econometric work.”

Related:

• Krugman’s trivilization of the Capital Controversey, by Lars Syll
• Hangups of the Heterodoxy, by Paul Krugman