… Whoops! Sorry, I forgot. He hasn’t got one has he?!

I think Dave’s non sequitur barb was amined at Hadleigh, not you. I’ll limit myself to saying it was elliptic.

Just had another look at Giles’ place and Paul Sagar has commented with insider knowledge to confirm that Frank Field is seriously considered to be a pre-election defection threat (though I’d have bet on just post-election).

Without wishing to get into a blogger-commenter love in, please rest assured that I take your comments, however robustly put, in the spirit of intellectual exploration with which they are intended. It is very welcome to have someone from beyond the left, if I can put it like, who is willing to engage with the blog on the basis that we are not simply loons, but have an intellectually valid perspective related to experience.

You’re quite right about leftwing economics and the difficulty in gaining ‘traction’. I think the key problem is that for over thirty years we’ve been exposed to a borad discourse of economic management which is based on the idea of a country’s/international economic management smply being a scaled up version of household ‘finite money supply’ economics (what I refer to in other posts as the ‘Thatcher handbag’ metaphor). This idea that, essentially, we must reduce spend when we are in debt has become very persuasive and overrides to a great extent any more seasoned Keynesian logic of the cycle and countercycle. This means it is an additional challenge to present Keynesian proposals in a way whicgh convinces, and that the best way to do it is often to set it off against what we portray as ‘economic illiteracy’.

This may not be, for the tehicnically minded like yourself and, say Giles at FreethinkEcon, be an attractive way of going about it, but it is, for me, the reality of the relationship between discourse and political power; I contend that it is simply more noticeable (as Dave suggests above) when it is the left that tries it on like this, because the left has tended to be too try and technical, and not polemic enough.

By the way, there’s furher commentary on Frank Field’s economic understanding at Giles’s place – http://freethinkecon.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/why-exactly-is-frank-field-a-labour-politician/. Nice to see another technical economist agreeing.

Within the context of your explanation of the purpose of the blog please take my post in that spirit. It is precisely for that reason that I read your blog, and why I particularly enjoy reading it on matters politic. I just have the feeling that on econ sometimes the style makes it hard to get traction. Perhaps that is because econ is a necessarily more pedantic subject and therefore requires much greater stipulation before positions can be appreciated…

Dave: re the non-seq: I genuinely can’t see one anywhere…