This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 29th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Economists will seemingly always disagree in economics as a field of study in which essential truths can be cast aside or forgotten.

Lawrence H White is author of the new book The Clash of Economic Ideas, The Great Policy Debates

and Experiments of the last hundred hundred years we spoke May 11th.

Why is it important that we go back through these historical debates over the last

hundred years about economics?

Well, I think we learned something about the nature of the current debate, where the ideas came from, and why the disagreements persist.

Somebody suggested to me that I... and why the disagreements persist.

Somebody suggested to me that I ought to subtitle the book,

why economists continue to disagree.

Because this is something that baffles the public that as the joke goes and I repeat this joke

and every other joke I can find in the book. If you laid all the economists end to

end they still couldn't reach a decision.

And the reason is that they're arguing about matters that aren't purely answerable with mathematics or statistics, but they're arguing about

fundamental views of what kind of society we want to live in.

Although my book is partly about economic philosophies,

but also partly about arguments

about what makes sense theoretically and what works in the real world.

So another reason we want to revisit the last hundred years is

to find out what conclusions people have drawn based on what evidence about what works and what doesn't work.

In here you write that Lorde Skidelski, when writing about John Maynard Keynes, certainly overstated the case by suggesting that Keynes invented

...