In a talk at the World Bank that I gave last week, I repeated a riff that I’ve used before. Suppose your internist told you: The x-ray shows a mass that is probably cancer, but we don’t have any good randomized clinical trials showing that your surgeon’s recommendation, operating to remove it, actually causes the remission that tends to follow. However, we do have an extremely clever clinical trial showing conclusively that Botox will make you look younger.

An article in The New York Times Magazine has a nice quote from a beltway insider about how politics works: ‘‘Diplomacy is about minimizing differences,’’ he told me. ‘‘ ‘Pol Pot and the Pope — surely there’s something they can agree on.’ A political campaign is exactly the opposite. It’s about taking a minor difference and blowing it up into something transcendent.’’ In my paper on mathiness, the human pattern of interaction that I set in opposition to politics was not diplomacy but science.

Consider these two statements: The model in Lucas (1972), Expectations and the Neutrality of Money, made a path breaking contribution to economic theory. It is comparable in importance to the Solow model and the Dixit-Stiglitz formulation of monopolistic competition. The model in Prescott and Kydland (1982), “Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations," has no scientific validity. Next, consider these two statements: Einstein’s model of the universe based on his theory of General Relativity, made a path breaking contribution to theoretical physics, even though in his first application, Einstein built a model of a steady state universe.

As an experiment, I’d like to try working with people who can solve technical issues that arise in my research and policy work. At the moment, the types of expertise that would be most useful are: Programming with Mathematica Typesetting with Tex IT, including Linux server administration I’d like to organize work around specific tasks. As they arise, I will send out an email to a list and include a desired turn-around time.

I had hoped to find time to offer a more thoughtful response to Simon Wren Lewis’s most recent comments on the way forward in macroeconomics but life is intruding, and I now I owe a response to Ray Fair (after I look at the work that he points to.) For now, I’ll go ahead with what I hope is a suggestion that could encourage some kind of consensus: Perhaps the discussion about macro would benefit from a distinction like the one in biomedicine between bench science and clinical work.