If one questions the old-school Keynesian orthodoxy, one risks being accused by Paul Krugman of being complicit in an “anti-scientific revolution” in macroeconomics:

[w]e had a scientific revolution in economics, one that dramatically increased our comprehension of the world and also gave us crucial practical guidance about what to do in the face of depressions. The broad outlines of the theory devised during that revolution have held up extremely well in the face of experience, while those rejecting the theory because it doesn’t correspond to their notion of common sense have been wrong every step of the way.

Yet a large part of both the political establishment and the economics establishment rejects the whole thing out of hand, because they don’t like the conclusions.

Galileo wept.

While there is no question of the importance of Keynesian models in 20th-century economic thinking, the current pluralism of modeling and empirical strategies in macroeconomics is a fact of life. The existence of divergent views on macroeconomics should not be surprising, given by the difficulty of doing clean empirical tests. Krugman does his discipline a disservice by elevating one narrow subset of models to the status of a well-established scientific truth and presenting the views of a large part of what he calls “the economics establishment” – i.e. of numerous other academics – as somehow obviously false and irrelevant.

So when it comes to economic journalism, one can – and should – do better than Krugman. To see a living example, come next Thursday to Cato and listen to Tim Harford (or watch live here if you can’t make it). Harford may disagree with libertarians on many issues but, unlike Krugman, he has always been the epitomy of civility. What is more, his writings demonstrate that one can communicate complicated ideas to wide audiences without falling into tired ideological clichés and self-righteousness.