What Comes Next? Longevity leads to inattention.

Last week Economic Principals emailed and posted an unedited version of A Doppelgänger for Keynes? The page was full of typos (since replaced on the Web by the edited version). EP had been distracted earlier in the day and wasn’t paying attention.

Two good things emerged from the mix-up. The week before, I had compared both Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – brilliant economists and dubious cultural entrepreneurs. An old friend wrote to ask whether I might find a better analogue for Keynes. I tried, and last week he wrote to say that he approved of my choice. He then summed up the argument more clearly than I had:

“Freud strikes me as an excellent Doppelgänger for Keynes.  Not only will their reputations be imperishable, but their ability to remain at the center of philosophical/political debates will persist.  Mark Twain’s reputation is imperishable, as is Albert Einstein’s, but they are not guaranteed to be the subject of fierce debates fifty years from now.  I suspect that Keynes and Freud will still have staunch defenders and opponents for quite a while, and their names will stand for evolving positions that they did not even articulate.”

The second good thing is that, after a week of thinking things over, EP has decided to stop writing weekly in the voice of a newspaper columnist and begin writing monthly, in the voice of  an author. (As David Warsh, I have written four books and am finishing a fifth.) Forty years of doing both jobs at once is long enough.  Longevity increases inattention to one task or the other, and sometimes both.

The end won’t come all at once. There  are  three more columns I want to write. Then we will settle up.

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