It won’t come as much of a surprise that our…cough cough…president was awake at 12:44 this morning in the White House with his personal phone in his hand making threats on Truth Social against his one-time pal, the deficit slasher whose waste, fraud, and abuse cuts ended up costing more money than they saved:

“Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate. It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one. Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

Why did Donny have his Depends in a wad, you might ask? Elon was threatening to form a new political party and run candidates against every Republican who voted for Trump’s Big Deficit-Busting Bill:

“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country—the PORKY PIG PARTY!! Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.”

And then Musk, who only a month ago had announced that he would be cutting back on his political spending, posted this:

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth.”

The bill passed the Senate this morning, of course, and heads over to the House, where Speaker Mike “Biblical Law” Johnson will push it through despite the fact that it will probably close half the rural hospitals in his state of Louisiana.

$930 billion in Medicaid cuts. $120 billion in SNAP food stamp cuts. 12 million fewer people will receive Medicaid benefits according to the Congressional Budget Office.

$3.3 trillion added to the budget deficit over the next ten years, but who’s counting?

Elon Musk, that’s who.

Trump hasn’t gotten back on Air Force One yet from his visit this morning to the Everglades site of his newest concentration camp, which they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz.” But when he’s back in the air, look for him calling on Pam Bondi to use the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to go after Elon’s naturalization as a citizen.

Yep, that’s a thing. They announced yesterday that the division of the DOJ that used to sue counties in the South for denying Black citizens the right to vote will now be used to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizen ship:

“The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," wrote Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate in a memo.

Elon, a former citizen of South Africa, is naturalized. Asked this morning on his way out of the White House to get on Air Force One if he has plans to deport Elon Musk, Trump answered, “I don't know, we'll have to take a look.”

Keep your popcorn handy and make sure your microwave is working. This is going to be good.

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This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

👊Punch Nazis👊

I have really bad news for America’s newly-empowered Nazis in ICE: This will all end very badly for you.

I get it! You think you’re protected! Everything is going according to plan. You’re obeying the law! (You’re not, but we’ll get to that) You’re the good guy! And this is America, right? Cops never get in trouble no matter how fucking crazy they get. Just have to wave that badge in front of a jury and all is forgiven. “I was a’feared for muh safety!” are the magic words that allow law enforcement to beat unarmed suspects to a pulp. Allows them to murder people in handcuffs and get a pat on the back. Hell, do it enough times and you get a cool medal for multiple kills!

And, hey, look at this awesome bill the GOP is trying to pass! ICE is gonna be on fucking steroids, bro!

Who is the regime going to hire with that $8 billion? Sober, experienced law enforcement professionals? Men, and it will be 98% men, who take the rule of law seriously and plan to uphold their oath to the Constitution? Bish, please. We all know the screening for candidates will involve questions like, “Have you ever fucked your cousin?” and “Please describe the the intense love you have for pointy white hoods." and “Whose birthday do you masturbate the hardest on: Hitler, Putin, or General Lee?”

Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are not going to be looking for rational adults. They’ll be looking for rabid animals willing to hunt down anyone not deemed sufficiently white enough to be a “real” American. And after they’ve scooped up enough of Those People, they’ll move on to the “enemies of the state.” You know, journalists and activists and “socialists” and Democrats and protesters and anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the new order.

What? You think Miller’s planned concentration camps are gonna fucking fill themselves?!

#NurembergThemAll

Now, this is the important thing to understand, and I really need our good friends in ICE to grasp this concept: Your regime is going to fall. And then we’re going to come for you.

I know…I know. The Fourth Reich will never fall. The last set of Nazis said the same thing. A thousand years, they said. The Bush regime said it would rule for 100 years. Trump said he would be president for life back during his first term and then his little insurrection didn’t succeed. He made it the second time but do you really want to bet your life he’ll be in power until he dies in, what? 8? 9 years? Man’s not looking so good these days. You think his idiot sons are going to take over? Maybe Lara Trump? Maybe Stephen Miller will rise to power as the new Führer! Maybe JD Vance will lead a new techbro oligarchy!

I think we all know that when Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, it’s all over for the MAGA movement. And his brain will be Swiss cheese long before that happens. But unless Trump strokes out before 2028, the regime is going to fall then anyway. You can’t stop it, no matter how much you might think you can.

And then things are going to get really ugly for you, really fast.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The only good Nazi is a ____ Nazi.

You may be betting that America will just “move on” like we have in the past. That we’ll concentrate on “looking forward, not back” like we did after Trump 1.0. And Bush. And the other Bush. And Reagan. And Nixon. And the decades of lynching and the KKK and the pro-Nazi movement in the 30s and the Civil War and and and. Literally a century and a half of traitors, fascists, slavers, and insurrectionists, almost all of them white men, all of them from the right. Always trying to destroy this country because you hate it and everything it stands for.

And we let you try again and again and again. Because we don’t punish racist white men in America.

Are you REALLY sure that history will hold? Because let me tell ya, buddy, we’re pretty fucking tired of you. We’ve been tired of you for a really long time and you’ve used up all of our tolerance and patience. That well done run dry. Now? Now we just want to put you up against a wall and put a bullet in your head.

Maybe you shouldn’t have come out of the Nazi closet. Maybe you shouldn’t have covered your faces and started grabbing people off the street like a secret police. We don’t have a secret police here. But you couldn’t wait to cosplay as the Gestapo, right? You had a throbbing erection for the unaccountable violence you’d get to visit on those filthy aliens you hate so much.

Maybe you should have stuck to the rule of law instead of wilding out. But you thought the good times would last forever and no one would ever come for you.

But we will.

Do you think Trump will pardon you? Do you think we’re going to give a fuck? We’re going to come for you and you’re either going to spend the rest of your life in a little box or you’re going to swing from the end of a rope. No one cares if you were just following orders. You had a choice but you were so eager to follow Stephen Miller’s Nazi vision for America you didn’t think about what would come after. There’s always an after. The regime always falls.

Sometimes, there are truth and reconciliation commissions. You should only BE so fucking lucky. We will not be having those. At least not at first. America is an extremely bloody-minded country and we do so like taking our revenge. We really REALLY don’t like Nazis and, boy howdy, are you fucks leaning into that swastika life.

When we find out what you’ve done in the camps you’ll be running? The rapes, the murders, the child trafficking? Because let’s be honest, you fucking pedophile freaks, you’re going to molest kids by the hundreds. We’re not going to want to reconcile with you. We’re going to want you dead. And you won’t be able to run fast enough, far enough to get away. How many of you think you can escape to Mother Russia? Think you’ll all be welcome there? Maybe. They need more cannon fodder for their war, after all.

Sure, a lot of you are hiding your faces. Not very well, though. Even so, you’re all on video. over and over again. You’re on video. Do you think we’re not going to be able to take your file and match it to your stupid Nazi face? I don’t give a fuck how much is covered. We’re going to know who you are and what you’ve done. And then you’re going to swing or rot in a cell.

Or maybe you’ll cooperate with the tribunals and you get to live. Oh? What? Did you think all of you would swear a blood oath to never betray your fellow rat fucks? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! First of all, not all of you are actually Nazis. Some of your fellow agents will manage not to stain their souls with blood and evil. Those agents are going to be more than happy to give the rest of you up. And then there will be the traitors. There are always traitors willing to sell the rest of you out to save their own skin. Fascists are weak and cowardly and, ultimately, pathetic. It’s the core of who you are. If you were a real man, you wouldn’t be a fascist.

So, yeah, we’re going to find out who you are no matter how hard you try to hide your identity. And then you get the Nuremberg treatment. No pardon will save you. No one will mourn you. You’ll just be another piece of shit Nazi crushed by the United States. Your blood will water the tree of liberty, a lesson for the rest of your kind to stay hidden because you’re not getting another shot at this.

You fucked around and I promise you, you’re going to find out.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 125 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

In the 2010s, it appeared that US health care expenditures as a share of GDP had peaked. But there group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that continually carries out and updates these estimates and forecasts. Their most recent projections suggest that US health spending is about to start rising again as a share of GDP. Sean P. Keehan, Andrew J. Madison, John A. Poisal, Gigi A. Cuckler, Sheila D. Smith, Andrea M. Sisko,Jacqueline A. Fiore, and Kathryn E. Rennie present the estimates in”National Health Expenditure Projections, 2024–33: Despite Insurance Coverage Declines, Health To Grow As Share Of GDP” (Health Affairs, July 2025).

For perspective, health care spending as a share of US GDP had been rising steadily over the half-century prior to 2010: 5% of GDP in 1960, 6.9% of GDP in 1970, 8.9% of GDP in 1980, 12.1% of GDP in 1990, 13.3% of GDP in 2000, and 17.2% of GDP in 2010.

However, in the decade after 2010, US health care spending as a share of GDP seemed to stabilize: for example, it was 17.4% of GDP in 2018 and 17.5% of GDP in 2019. When the pandemic hit, and US health care expenditures leaped to 19.5% of GDP in 2020. But by 2022, health care expenditures had fallen back to 17.3% of GDP, similar to the prevailing level in the 2010s.

But looking ahead, the authors from CMS write: “Each year for the full 2024–33 projection period, national health care expenditure growth (averaging 5.8 percent) is expected to outpace that for the gross domestic product (GDP; averaging 4.3 percent) and to result in a health share of GDP that reaches 20.3 percent by 2033 (up from 17.6 percent in 2023).”

What’s behind that overall estimate? The authors explain:

During 2024–33, Medicare spending is projected to grow the most rapidly, at a rate of
7.8 percent annually … , mostly as a result of strong average enrollment growth compared with Medicaid and private health insurance as the last cohort of baby boomers ages into Medicare through 2029. Although yearly spending trends are projected to be more volatile for Medicaid than for other payers, annual Medicaid spending growth is projected to average 6.4 percent for the period 2024–33, which is about the same as the program’s average during the twenty-year period 2000–19. For private health insurance, high growth in utilization, along with notable changes in enrollment, are expected to moderate during 2024–33, with spending projected to increase by 5.2 percent, on average. … The out-of-pocket share of total health spending is projected to decline from 10.4 percent in 2023 to 9.1 percent by 2033.

Of course, projections should always be taken with a grain of salt. I’ll take up the question of how to moderate the rise in health care spending some other day. Here, I’ll just make three points. First, an increase in health care spending can be a good thing when it is accompanied by broad improvements in overall health statistics for the population, which does not especially seem to be the case for the United States. issues. Second, when an ever-increasing share of GDP goes to producing health care, that money isn’t available for other socially desireable goals–including wage increases and public spending priorities. Third, every dollar spent on health care is a dollar in income to some participant in the health care system, all of who believe that their work benefits patients, and all of whom can be counted on to protest loudly any attempt to slow the growth rate of such spending.

The post US Health Care Expenditures: An Ominous Trend Returns? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Let’s take a step back into the distant past of…March 2025. Trump had just been sworn in several weeks earlier, and his regime immediately set the Constitution on fire. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, was rampaging through the federal government, stealing trillions of dollars’ worth of personal data and illegally firing tens of thousands of federal employees.

Masked ICE agents began to grab people off the street with no warrant and make them disappear. The first human trafficking flight to a concentration camp in Central America was on March 15, in direct violation of a court order. The country was terrified. The press was working 24/7 to sanewash a rabid president and normalize open lawlessness by a fascist regime. The Republican Party was gloating about Trump’s (nonexistent) massive mandate and a new dawn in ‘Murika. Elections didn’t matter because by the time they came? This would be The White Christian States of Trump.

March was a really long time ago, wasn’t it? All that Republican swagger vanished. Where is it? In a supermax prison in El Salvador?

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

Let’s fast forward from March to the far-flung future of June 30, 2025. In the three and a half months since the regime peaked, how are things going for them?

• Trump has lost about 93% of the cases brought against his regime.

• Elon Musk has been exiled from his government job and is now attacking Trump and his signature bill, the MAGA Murder Budget.

• Trump’s triumphant, masturbatory military parade was a disaster, complete with laughably low attendance and the troops making it very clear they were not on board with the fascism.

• At the exact same time no one showed up to cheer for Trump, several million people took to the streets to cheer for democracy in one of the largest, and definitely most widespread, protests in American history.

• Trump’s public support has vanished.

• Voters fucking HATE the “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans are trying to pass. Even Republicans hate it if they’re aware of what’s in it, something Democrats have been screaming at the top of their lungs and the legacy press has been kind of mumbling under their breath.

This last part is where we pick up the story of now. Remember, Republicans were strutting with their collective dick swinging around. They had a mandate, baby! Fucking ‘Murika! MAGA all the way! Those pussy libs couldn’t do anything. Trump was inevitable and who cares about elections?

A party convinced they don’t have to worry about elections doesn’t give a shit about what the voters think. And when the House Republicans put this bill together, they surely did not care. They were loud and proud about how they were going to gut Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps and Meals on Wheels and just steal literally hundreds of billions from the poor and middle class to feed the endless greed of the fascist billionaires that own the GOP.

By the time they passed the bill, though? They were fighting tooth and nail to secure the votes. Whole lot of threats and compromises and even more threats to get it over the finish line. That was five weeks ago.

Since then, things have gotten even worse. Senate Republicans are tearing each other to pieces over the bill. Trump is threatening primaries. “Moderate” Lisa Murkowski needed a massive bribe. Thom Tillis said, “Fuck you” and then announced he wouldn’t run for reelection next year.

The bill is so bloated and mangled, the Senate Parliamentarian is shooting down crucial pieces of it and Republicans are responding by lying and cheating as they always do. Trump is demanding they simply ignore her and pass whatever they want. But the Senate GOP is not doing that (yet). Why not? Elections don’t matter anymore, right? This is the Thousand-Year Reich, so who cares if they ignore the rules?

Three months ago, Republicans might have done that. They might have done away with the filibuster, too. Something else they haven’t done but should have if they really believed there isn’t going to be another election. Why keep it if they’ll be in power forever? When democracy is dead forever, consequences are only for the losing side.

But the Trump of three months ago isn’t the Trump of now. He’s weak and flailing and still a bumbling incompetent.

Meanwhile, the public of three months ago absolutely isn’t the public of now. We’re angry. So SO very fucking angry and getting more organized by the day. More organized and more militant in our organization.

Trump may have convinced himself that there will not be another election but the Republican Party VERY much believes the midterms are coming and they are very afraid of them.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre Wave is coming!!!

Here are a few things to consider and I will continue to point them out:

• The Trumpcession has not hit yet. It’s coming and it’s going to be bad - When millions of people lose their jobs and the federal government does nothing at all to help, because Project 2025’s solution to a recession is “Fuck you, Poors!”, no one is going to blame Joe Biden or trans kids. They’re going to blame Trump and the GOP.

• The tariffs haven’t fully impacted the economy yet and Trump is still a fucking moron engaging the country in a global trading war we cannot win - On top of the inflation that’s coming down the pike as the tariffs jack up prices on huge swathes of the economy, Trump’s stupidity is crashing the value of the Dollar and it’s going to get worse.

• Stephen Miller’s Nazi war against immigrants is going to do massive damage - On top of destroying millions of lives, Miller’s blind racist rage will devastate several industries including hotels, farming, restaurants, and construction. With the economy already stumbling, this will be a killing blow and food prices will skyrocket as crops rot in the field.

• Musk is not on Trump’s side anymore - Will Musk fund primaries against Trump allies? Possibly. But even withholding his money and support is a massive blow to Trump who would not have “won” the 2024 election with the billionaire and his propaganda machine.

• The ongoing cuts to the government will be felt soon enough in red states - Even before the MAGA Murder Budget, Republicans have gutted thousands of programs that overwhelmingly served rural America and red states. They’re already noticing all of that support disappearing and they’re going to want to know why. (Hint: Not trans kids)

• RFK Jr’s vaccine bullshit will kill tens of thousands of people and we’ll all know whose fault it is - By limiting access to the flu and covid vaccines this Fall, the death toll will be unlike anything we’ve seen since 2020. Who’s going to get the blame for that? Not migrants.

• Iran and Israel will keep fighting and we will get more involved - Netanyahu cannot allow peace to break out or his criminal trial will proceed. Therefore, Israel will be back at war before the summer is over and Trump, his little mushroom dick hard over the idea of being a “wartime president,” will throw us headlong into the fight. No planning. No exit strategy. Just “cool” footage for the news and demands of absolute loyalty. But a new endless Middle East war will infuriate at least some of the GOP base as well as the rest of the non-MAGA country.

• ICE will continue to spiral out of control - Stephen Miller’s Gestapo grows bolder by the day, convinced that they will never be held accountable for their actions. They are so very very wrong about this. But while they’re high on their own supply, their violence will increasingly sicken the public. Eventually, they will beat someone to death on camera because white nationalists are animals and they’ve been waiting their whole lives for this. They won’t even care if they’re undocumented or not because they’ll have brown skin and that’s all that matters. The public backlash will make the George Floyd protests look like a gathering of elderly British librarians having Sunday tea.

When all of this comes to pass, Trump will be weaker than any president in history and the public will be raging at him more than anyone thought possible. This November’s off-year elections are going to be a bloodbath presaging a midterm slaughter that will put the House and Senate firmly in the hands of the democrats and yank a number of even gerrymandered state legislatures to the left. Republicans will long for the days of the 2018 blue wave.

Now, it’s important to understand that Trump desperately wants to use the military to seize control of the country. To declare an “emergency” and cancel the elections. That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.

It’s a very bad plan.

There is no mechanism to cancel or even delay the midterms. The federal government cannot dictate when and where states hold their elections. Trump can write an executive order demanding they be canceled and…what? What Democratic-controlled state would honor it? Would the Supreme Court uphold it on the grounds that Trump is king? There is not one single letter in the Constitution to support Trump’s plan and inventing new powers would simply trigger riots.

Now, Trump may want that but the United Military is clearly not onboard and even if they were, they simply are not large enough to seize control of more than one or two big cities. So how does that work? Fingers crossed and hope for the best? Dissolve the Senate and House and hope no one says anything? Hunker down in the White House and rule by fiat? Hope enough of the police or militias join you to put down the riots?

If Trump had the kind of support he needed to do this, millions of Proud Boys would have been in the streets, beating up protesters on No Kings Day. But they weren’t. Isn’t that strange?

Republicans may cram through this bill because they’re afraid of Trump and his cult of murderous monsters. But this should have been easy for them. Deficits don’t matter when elections don’t exist. The debt doesn’t matter when elections aren’t happening. Public rage at the contents of a bill you were gloating about just a month ago doesn’t matter because the public doesn’t get to vote anymore.

But that’s not how Republicans are acting at all. Most of them are very much convinced that passing this bill is electoral suicide and they’ve been trying to do it in the middle of the night behind closed doors. They’ve been lying about what’s in the bill, whereas before they didn’t bother lying at all. They know.

Trump is weak and getting weaker. They’re afraid because they know we’re coming for them, and they no longer believe Trump can stop us.

Fascism relies on the illusion of infallibility, and that illusion has been well and truly shattered. By this time next year, the rats will be fleeing the flaming wreckage of Trump’s regime, trying to save themselves without incurring the wrath of the mad king. Look for an enormous number of “retirements” from the right as dozens of Republicans decide to “spend more time with their families.”

Those are the filthy rats fleeing the coming blue wave.

For their part, Trump and his regime will be lashing out in a wild panic, desperately trying to subdue us. So this is going to get worse before it gets better. Document all of it. Make a record for the tribunals and use the anger to fuel you because when this is over, and it WILL be over, the Nazis will either spend the rest of their lives in a small cell or swing from the rope for what they’ve done. Count on it.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 126 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Is it professionally worthwhile–not just as a form of light intellectual entertainment–for a modern economist to read articles and books written long ago? Do old article contain within them the possibility of live insights for modern economists? Matthew McCaffrey, Joseph T. Salerno, and Carmen-Elena Dorobat make the case for an affirmative answer in “The History of Economic Thought as a Living Laboratory” Cambridge Journal of Economics, March 2025, pp. 235-253). They write:

We argue that the history of thought can be conceived as a living laboratory of economic theorising. It is living in that it is a vital and valuable part of economics rather than a dead branch of it. It is a laboratory in that it functions as a proving ground in which theories from many different times and contexts can be examined, compared, critiqued, combined and developed. In other words, history of thought can be conceived as a method of doing economics rather than an isolated or niche field within it. …

For example, Axel Leijonhufvud similarly conceived of economics as a vast decision tree with many branches, each of which can be traced back to earlier choices by economists in a sequence potentially centuries long (Leijonhufvud, 2006). This is consistent with our own approach in that it views modern economics (the topmost branches of the tree) as embodying and reflecting a rich, living history of past choices and paths not taken (the lower branches or bits of tree trunk). Our approach expands some elements of the tree metaphor. In particular, our view is that HET [history of economic thought] is the tree itself rather than one of its dead branches or forgotten roots: there is no arbitrary point at which a branch becomes historical and therefore separate from the rest. Even the most recent branches exist synchronously with older ones. The decision tree of economics is dynamic, and old or seemingly withered branches can grow healthily again even after years of neglect.

The authors trace the “laboratory” metaphor back to Frank A. Fetter (1863-1949), who wrote:

Something of worth to present thought is, therefore, often to be gained by a restudy of past opinions, even though the first result may seem to be merely to expose their error. Showing that a thing cannot be done in a way that looks promising is often a service of laboratory research second only in value to showing how it can be done. The history of economic thought is the experimental laboratory of economics, or as near to that enviable agency of the physical sciences as social students are able to come.

They quote from Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) magisterial History of Economic Analyis, published posthumously in 1954:

[O]ur minds are apt to derive new inspiration from the study of the history of science. Some do so more than others, but there are probably few that do not derive from it any benefit at all. A man’s mind must be indeed sluggish if, standing back from the work of his time and beholding the wide mountain ranges of past thought, he does not experience a widening of his own horizon… But, besides inspiration every one of us may glean lessons from the history of his science that are useful, even though sometimes discouraging. We learn about both the futility and the fertility of controversies; about detours, wasted efforts, and blind alleys; about spells of arrested growth, about our dependence on chance, about how not to do things, about leeways to make up for. We learn to understand why we are as far as we actually are and also why we are not further. And we learn what succeeds and how and why.

Mark Blaug (1927-1911) took the laboratory metaphor a step further in the final pages of his Economic Theory in Retrospect, using it to emphasise the need for humility in economics, and for acknowledging the inescapable influence of the history of ideas:

One justification for the study of the history of economics, but of course only one, is that it provides a more extensive ‘laboratory’ in which to acquire methodological humility about the actual accomplishments of economics. Furthermore, it is a laboratory that every economist carries with him, whether he is aware of it or not. When someone claims to explain the determination of wages without bringing in marginal productivity, or to measure capital in its own physical units, or to demonstrate the benefits of the Invisible Hand by purely objective [i.e., without resorting to subjective value judgments] criteria, the average economist reacts almost instinctively but it is an instinct acquired by the lingering echoes of the history of the subject.

As McCaffrey, Salerno, and Dorobat argue: “In this version, the laboratory functions as a way of keeping economists grounded and avoiding mistaken claims of originality or inflated assertions of significance. It is also noteworthy that Blaug describes the history of thought as a ‘more extensive’ laboratory, implying the existence of a less extensive version. That version most likely refers to contemporary theorising without the benefit of history. In other words, Blaug too is suggesting that the history of ideas provides a richer and more expansive range of knowledge and ‘tools’ for economists to use. It is a crucial part of the economic record that gives us far more material to work with when determining the successes and failures of economic theory.”

I’ve read more history of economic thought than a number of modern economists; indeed, back in graduate school I even ploughed through Schumpeter’s thoroughly intimidating 1000-plus pages of the History of Economic Analysis. My own revealed choices suggest that I find it worthwhile to read the work of dead economists. But of course, my own preferences are not dispositive.

On one side, it seems to me that in questions of economics, inspiration can come from many sources. For some, inspiration arrives in the act of writing down and spelling out a mathematical model. For others, it arrives in the form of observations about the world that don’t seem well-explained by standard theory. For others, it arrives a part of the effort to answer a real-world policy question. Among the many potential sources of inspiration, it’s not hard to imagine that for some people, reading the efforts of earlier economists trying to come to grips with an issue might touch off a spark of insight.

But time is the consummate scarce resource. If an economist is looking for inspiration and insight, is it more likely to be discovered by spending the marginal hour reading articles by dead economists or by live ones? The answer probably depends on an idiosyncratic mix of reader and topic. But there is an intermediate choice, which is to be willing, now and again, to dip into the writings by those who specialize in history of economic thought. Their work offers a pre-chewed and partially digested version of past writings, which in more than a few cases has pushed me to dig deeper.

One of my friends used to say that “I’ll think about history of economic thought when I’m doomed to repeat it.” In that spirit, I’ll point out that many modern policy nostrums have actually been the subject of considerable debate. The arguments and evidence on how price controls work, or don’t, goes back centuries, as do the arguments about the effects of tariffs. Arguments about specific applications of price controls, like rent control, or about specific applications of tariffs, like favoring cerain domestic industries for purposes of national economic development, go back decades. If, say, rent control was a useful and obvious method of providing affordable housing across a large metro area or a country, one might expect to find lots of examples in the history of economic thought explaining how well it worked, and why. For me, history of economic thought often is useful in teaching humility, because it’s often true that very smart people have thought deeply about similar questions in the past. There’s a centuries-old saying to the effect: “If I see further, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” A neglect of the history of thought is an apparent belief that it saves time not to stand on the shoulders of giants.

As an editor, I’ll offer one other thought: If you haven’t actually read the article or book by a dead economist, be very cautious about repeating a quotation that you saw or heard someplace. A random quotation might seem like just a bit of color to enliven dreary prose, but if the quotation does not actually capture the original argument, then for those who have read the original, it marks you as unreliable.

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