THE DISINTEREST IN BEING AGREEABLE.  Ryan Avent:

Why does it seem to laypeople as though economists can’t agree about anything? I can give you a few reasons. First, Paul Krugman isn’t going to write a column saying, “Here are the many, many things on which both I and my University of Chicago antagonists agree,” and the Journal isn’t going to get Gary Becker to write a column saying, “Indeed, on these many things we see eye-to-eye.” Second, the most riveting economic events are those, like global recessions, that occur infrequently, and about which there is far less certainty than other, more common events. Critics make hay of the fact that economists seem not to have come any closer on these issues in 80 years, but this amounts to no more than academics debating the meaning of the first lab test while they run the second. And third, the stakes of the policy debate are high, and so commentary is passionate and intense. It begins to seem as though economics is riven through by unbridgeable gulfs, and that these gulfs are as yawning now as they’ve ever been. 

But that’s not remotely what economics is like. While Krugman and others bash each other in newspapers, thousands of academic economists are gathering in reams of data, playing with new models, and trying, quite civilly, to figure out what we’ve learned from the Great Recession. Meanwhile, many thousands more are focusing on research related to all the other branches of economics — research which continues to yield solid and useful results.

You don’t have to be able to explain dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to understand these things about economics. You just need to be prepared to approach an important academic discipline with a tiny bit a humility.

And give as well as you get in the public forum?