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I had five minutes to kill so I read this: Cogan, Taylor and the Confidence Fairy, by Paul Krugman.

Let's see, what do we have here? Ah, yes...I see Krugman accusing Taylor of being dishonest. Paulo, Paulo...tsk tsk.

To be more specific, Krugman accuses Cogan and Taylor of dishonesty concerning the current state of macroeconomic research. The claim they made was that expectations did not play and explicit role in "old style" Keynesian models. Of course, Keynes and most of the other great economists of the 19th and early 20th centuries assigned a critical role to expectations. But if by "old style" Keynesian models we mean Hicks' IS-LM representation of (a part of) Keynes' theory, then Cogan and Taylor are largely correct. For example, do you see expectations entering explicitly anywhere in this exposition?

By the way, I find it a bit of a hoot that it is Krugman complaining that others in the field are not keeping abreast with the literature. Steve Williamson has addressed this on more than one occasion; see here, for example. But anyway, this is getting rather tiresome.

In fact, it appears that Krugman did not even read the Cogan and Taylor paper. Fortunately, Noah Smith helps lift the lazyman's load: John Taylor's Austerity Model. (Oh gosh, it appears that their results have nothing to do with the "confidence fairy." Oh well, "confidence fairy" looks so good in the title of a NY Times Op-Ed piece.) Noah summarizes his assessment of their work as follows:

Upshot: If you have no Zero Lower Bound, and if the Fed partially counteracts the demand-side effects of fiscal policy, and if people have forward-looking expectations, and if you don't cut government purchases much, and if taxes are very distortionary, then austerity works. This is not really a new result, but it rarely gets shown so explicitly, so it's good that John Taylor and his co-authors went ahead and did it.

Now there's something that economists can debate.

Unfortunately, Noah stumbles a bit on the partisan divide with this concluding statement:

So John Taylor is not committing some major fallacy. He's just using a standard mainstream New Keynesian DSGE model to stump for the Republicans.

I may very well be wrong but I do not ever recall Noah saying something like (say, in regard to the Eggertsson and Krugman model):

So Paul Krugman is not committing some major fallacy. He's just using a standard mainstream New Keynesian DSGE model to stump for the Democrats.

I mean, come on ... let's all stop this nonsense. Debate the substance of the argument and the evidence supporting it. Doing anything else distracts from the task at hand.

Wonkish (and important) note: Those"powerful fiscal effects at the zero lower bound" that Noah alludes to are quite possibly an artifact of the manner in which the NK DSGE model is linearized around steady state (linearization not taking into account the zero lower bound, with zero lower bound imposed afterward). Please refer to: Some Unpleasant Properties of Log-Linearized Solutions When the Nominal Rate is Zero.