Elephantstrunk

More aggressive but fatuous baiting of Dani Rodrik from Alex Tabarrok.

I was going to point out that Tabarrok can’t decide whether it is Pareto efficiency or creative destruction that makes markets good and that his example of the motor car opens the floodgates but Lee Arnold, Samson and Barkley Rosser do a better job of it.

They do give him too much credit on his claim that the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics supplies sufficient but not necessary conditions for a market to achieve efficiency. It is sort of true but if that was all it did it would be hardly worth comment. He’s driving camels though the eye of the needle.

In fact it is noticeable that almost everyone commenter displaying familiarity with the theorem disagrees with him.

The extremely uncharitable reading of Rodrik’s very frank posting will not convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with Tabarrok but along with earlier stuff from Tabarrok and his colleague Don Boudreaux it looks like the combination of obfuscation, pettifogging, innuendo and disingenuity dealt to Paul Krugman.

There is notably no attempt to address Rodrik’s principal point that sometimes explicit government intervention has worked better than policies that at least superficially look laissez-faire with international development being a major one. Still Na Pratica slips in a proper reading of Rodrik before Max the Wise delivers an impressive illustration of Godwin’s law. If I could read Portugese I think I would be a regular reader of Na Prática a Teoria é Outra.