I’m sorry to say that it sounds like Mr. Kay wrote this essay on his lunch hour. Now, I’m not saying that he didn’t have a point, and that it wasn’t well argued, in a self-serving kind of way. That deadline can be a cruel master! Although the reference to gun control did leave me doubting it’s relevance, but sure of it’s appeal to a conservative readership. But  the essay was more a collection of broad generalizations supported by some apt quotations. A rough sketch but not a finished drawing?

Mr. Kay might remind his anonymous economist about  Deirdre N. McCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics, second edition, chapter 7 titled ‘The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification’, that quantification is an integral part of economics as a whole, and rhetoric is it’s means of delivery. The part that Keynes plays, as a major character in this literary vinaigrette, as man of reason and empiricism doesn’t quite – the quote from the utterly dubious Robert Rubin brings this essay to a welcome, but ignominious end. My comment, I hope, doesn’t follow Mr. Kay’s lead.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96a620a8-3a8d-11e5-bbd1-b37bc06f590c.html#axzz3hljetR2h