Scholars are notorious for “burying the lede.” That is, scholars too often begin their scholarly papers in such a way as to hide the most exciting stuff.

Take Mark Thornton. He has written some papers I have thoroughly enjoyed. (Indeed, I think I have blogged about a few of them, or at least meant to do so.) And I certainly enjoyed reading “Mises vs. Fisher on Money, Method, and Prediction: The Case of the Great Depression.”

Trouble, though: He devotes four paragraphs to Ludwig von Mises before he gets to the most interesting possible hook in his essay:

Representing nearly polar-opposite views, [Irving] Fisher placed prediction at the heart of his science and yet had no foresight of the Great Depression, while Mises cast economic forecasting outside the realm of economic science and yet was able to predict the depression and accurately describe the pitfalls of Fisher’s monetary system in 1928.

This would have been such a killer paper had Thornton managed to unearth this thought and plant it right at the beginning.

Indeed, a whole book of contrasts between economists, of this order, would be a fun book indeed. One section must be devoted to the Schmoller/Pareto controversy. (Actually, a movie could be fun. I like the idea of the great Vilfredo Pareto pretending to be a down-and-outer, asking the august Schmoller, on the street, where he could find free food at a restaurant. When Schmoller laughs off the idea, Pareto reveals himself and yells “Aha: Then there are economic laws!” A great cinematic moment.)

But back to Thornton’s paper. There are a lot of good passages. Take this one:

Progressives such as Irving Fisher were the vanguard of the “new era” of the 1920s, proclaiming it to be nothing less the than the early stages of a real-world utopia. Fisher was an enthusiastic supporter of Herbert Hoover and believed that the great economic prosperity of the 1920s was attributable to alcohol prohibition and, more importantly, the “scientific” stabilization of the dollar that had been undertaken by the Federal Reserve. In his view, this new technocracy would employ price indexes to measure the value of the dollar, and Federal Reserve policies would maintain a stable dollar. Using this approach Fisher believed that business cycles would be a thing of the past, and with his policies firmly in place Fisher was completely blindsided by the Great Depression.

Lots of food for thought in this piece, buried lede notwithstanding. And room for argument. Why not read it?