Noah Smith — Liberals Compete for the Soul of Economics

But there are not one, but two big trends in liberal economic thinking. One wants to modify the economic thinking of the past few decades, and the other wants to rip it up. I expect to see a lot of the economic debate in the coming years play out not between the left and right, but between these two strains of thought.

More controversy on the way. Will MMT finally get a hearing?

Not if Noah Smith has it right. Noah completely ignores Post Keynesian economics and Institutinoalism as an overlapping cluster of schools and talks instead of evolutionary economics and complexity economics, which are still in their infancy compared with PKE.

Is Noah blindsided, or is this Bloomberg policy?

Bloomberg View
Liberals Compete for the Soul of Economics

Noah Smith, contributor
ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Jag Bhalla — Stop Associating Adam Smith with Laissez-Faire Economics

Some keeper Smith quotes.

Evonomics
Stop Associating Adam Smith with Laissez-Faire Economics
Jag Bhalla

Corey Robin — Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America

For the free-market right, that’s the end of the discussion: Workers are free. No one’s forcing them to work. If they don’t like a job, they can leave it.

For the socialist left, it’s more complicated. Workers are not in fact free, the left argues, but the source of their unfreedom is not to be found in the usual guise. The most important constraint upon the freedom of contract is not the discrete or formal acts of coercion by power-holders (what political scientists sometimes call the first face of power), which are embodied in law and enforced by the state. Rather, it is systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital....

Corey Robin
Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America

The phrase, "systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital," says it in a nutshell. It's about institutional power, which is masked by the bogus narrative of individualism as the basis of economic liberalism.