Dean Baker is annoyed, and rightly so, at claims that Keynesians failed to predict the slow recovery. Dean and I were both tearing our hair out in early 2009, warning that the Obama stimulus was too small and too short-lived.
But actually it’s worse than that. Samuelson is taking the fact that this business cycle didn’t look like previous cycles as evidence that we don’t understand macroeconomics, so we shouldn’t even try to help the economy. But I was predicting a protracted jobless recovery long before the recession was official, and explained carefully why.
But then I also fairly often get comments along the lines of “If you’re so smart, how come you didn’t see the housing bubble”, when I not only did see it (although Dean saw it much earlier), but got a lot of flak for daring to raise questions about the Bush Boom.
Well, I guess you can’t expect people to be aware of what I was saying, seeing as how I only write for an obscure publication nobody has heard of.