I actually read the letter first, which I found from Mankiw's site. Basically, Athreya says talking heads on the subject will likely have little to offer than a lot of confusion. He means this in a probabilistic sense, in that some of these commentators might have great ideas and be completely spot on, but it's not that likely. The simple reason that it's not likely is that economics is hard. The saying that there's no such thing as a one handed economist is true. Everything depends, and that's just the way it goes. To learn how everything depends takes a hell of a lot of effort and time. Athreya points out that there are many people willing to comment blindly on economics but few do the same about cancer research. Yet both are rather difficult. The general point of the letter seemed to be more of a public service announcement, cautioning people from taking the talking heads too seriously (and he included some economists in the group). He concluded by hoping that non-economists would start writing about the premises which lead to particular conclusions, in hopes of producing a sharper public discussion. To me, this seemed like a rational plea for a more informed media.
Then I saw this Evans-Pritchard fellow's article (linked to by Instapundit). He took a lot of umbrage to what Athreya wrote. When he read the letter, he seemed to see this as the entire federal reserve system telling economics commentators to shut up. His rebukes were basically that the institution is full of idiots and economics is rather simple and the economists (all of them) at the Fed are responsible for the current crisis. Oh, he also apparently quotes the article:
"Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that's just peanuts compared to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn't blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it's so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns."
Except this quote never appears in the article. Not once. I've searched the paper over and over again. Actually, when I first read Evans-Pritchard's article, I thought he was talking about a different economist who wrote a similar letter because I didn't remember this quote. This phrase, as far as I can tell, was penned by Michael Wade of the SF Examiner on the same subject. This is Wade's summary of the article in a what he believes is a Douglas Adams-y style, so he uses quotation marks. A blog called the Agonist lumped Wade's summary into a list of quotes from the article in this post.
I was trying to figure out how Evans-Pritchard could misinterpret the article so drastically, but then I realized that the answer should have been obvious. He's one of the talking heads Athreya is talking about. He's been one for 25 years. And now an economist from an organization Evans-Pritchard obviously distrusts is saying that commentators (like Evans-Pritchard) aren't adding anything constructive or new to the discussion. Of course! The obvious response is to attack not only that economist, but economics as a profession!
Just to demonstrate that he is in the know and that all economists are idiots, he whips out Keynes and Irving Fisher claiming economists have forgotten their wisdom. Oddly enough, in attempting to demonstrate his knowledge he actually proves Dr. Athreya right by only stating names and conclusions. Adding positively to the discussion would involve thinking about the underlying premises of Keynes' and Fisher's ideas and writing how they're similar or different from the conditions in 2007 (i.e. whether they're even applicable now), for one example. That is what Athreya hopes for at the end of his letter (if I understood it correctly). But I suppose Evans-Pritchard is above all that critical thinking. And how dare some lowly academic ask the media to be educated.
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