When is a Joke Not a Joke?

Friday, 15 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

Like many of you, I receive several emails per day from various people that are humorous, inspirational or just plain weird. Several weeks back I received a link to a YouTube video entitled “Keynes vs. Hayek, Round 2”. This turned out to be a follow-up to a video from early 2010 called, “Fear the Boom and Bust, a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem”. The original video deals with some basic macroeconomic theory in an accessible way and the follow-up video questions the role of government spending in the economy. Both videos are cute in a thought-provoking kind of way. I used them in my summer school course and the students got a kick out of it. Last week, the “Q&A” segment on C-Span interviewed the producers of the videos.

While the interview is pretty much what you’d expect, a couple of references to works by Hayek led me to his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech entitled, “The Pretense of Knowledge”. It’s not terribly long or complicated (some background in economics is helpful, but not required) and I commend it to your consideration.

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