Really interesting comment thread over at Mark Thoma's place on supply-side economics. Bruce bartlett, one of the original supply-siders, and Paul Krugman, both get in on the action. Bartlett, in fact, makes a fairly good point in response to Thoma's critique of the supply-siders, and one that requires a certain amount of humility to advance:
think Mark misses the historical context of my analysis. In the 1970s, we were unaware of real business cycle theory or New Keynesian theory. We were confronting Old Keynesian theory. What Mark has basically done is take a current theoretical debate and superimposed it on the 1970s. That's fine if one's goal is to understand how the economy really worked in the 1970s or what the actual effects of policies taken at that time were. But as a matter of history, it is misleading. We didn't know any of this stuff because it didn't exist then. We were dealing with a far different situation in terms of what people knew about the economy (or thought they knew) and that's one reason why I believe that terms like "supply-side economics" have outlived their usefulness. The context in which the term had meaning no longer exists and therefore it has become a barrier to communication rather than a facilitator.
From there the debate goes into the true nature of the Keynesians during the 70s, how Congressional economic policy making differs from academic economic theorizing, and much more. Fascinating stuff if you're at all interested in economic history, and props to both Paul and Bruce for mixing it up a bit.
