I’ve been very critical of “fresh-water macro-economists;” critical not just because they promoted answers to questions of great practical significance that were obviously false; harshly critical of the damage they did to foundation of scientific inquiry by using thuggish, coordinated coercion to dominate discourse in macroeconomics.

Bob and Mike were independent thinkers with too much intellectual integrity to be caught up in the fresh-water mindset. I admire how they kept the lines of communication open with the many economists who were trapped by it. Bob and Mike kept trying, doggedly, to get everyone to pay attention to logic and evidence.

They are models of how to maintain intellectual integrity at a time when pseudo-scientific group-think prevails. It is great for the profession, and for science, that their contributions have now been recognized.

Sometimes the good guys win.

Postscript

I believe it was Bob who first drew the distinction between “fresh-water” macro-economists (clustered around the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota) and “salt-water” economists (based on the east and west coasts). He presented the dividing line with characteristic humor, but you knew which side he was on. Bob was trained at MIT and worked at Stanford.

Mike was trained at MIT. For a few years, he tried to work at the UofC but eventually moved to Princeton, then Columbia. For the record, I was trained at both MIT (first two years of graduate school) and Chicago (last two years) and worked for a few years at the UofC before moving to Berkeley, Stanford, NYU, and BC.