In his review of the biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, J. Bradford DeLong offers cynical but perhaps accurate rules for establishing a new economic paradigm:

Harry Johnson, in his superb but not entirely fair critique of Milton Friedman's Monetarists, said that in order to carry out an intellectual revolution in economics, one must propound a doctrine that has three qualities: it can be summarized in a single sentence, it provides the young with an excuse for ignoring the work of their elders, and it tells the young what they can do to further the revolution. John Maynard Keynes and Friedman both offered such doctrines. They said, respectively, that "aggregate demand determines supply" and that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"; they dismissed their predecessors as obsolete; and they set hundreds of young to the task of estimating consumption, investment, and money-demand functions.

Hmmm — the same three principles would seem to apply to overthrowing a society, starting a new religion, or creating any other sort of successful self-propagating change ...

(the review of Richard Parker's biography of Galbraith appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine, May/June 2005; cf. CommonUnderstanding (8 Oct 1999), ScientificRevolutions (16 Aug 2002), ...)

TopicEconomics - TopicHumor - 2005-10-10

(correlates: AllSunsets, GatherScatter, BureaucraticImmuneSystem, ...)