The Blogosphere vs Eugene Fama

Eugene Fama has only just started blogging, but already he’s run into some fearsome firepower: his post claiming that a stimulus package won’t boost employment has received no fewer than three rebuttals from Brad DeLong alone. The first claims that Fama has rediscovered a long-discarded view from the 1920s, while the other two just pile on — alongside Mark Thoma ("Fama’s reasoning is dead wrong–and embarrassing"), Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, and Justin Fox:

The form of Fama’s piece is: Here’s this theory of how the world works (and I’m going to completely ignore the fact that there are other well-established theories and a whole lot of data that contradict it).

I hope that Fama understands that the blogosphere is a conversation, and engages with his critics rather than ignoring them, or abandoning the blog as more trouble than it’s worth. But this is a tough crowd, and, with the single exception of Greg Mankiw (and even he disagrees with Fama), they’re not exactly treating the newbie with kid gloves.

Update: DeLong IV.

Update 2: Fama responds. "To date there is just one valid negative comment on my essay," he writes, "from J. Bradford DeLong". Take that, Thoma! Meanwhile, DeLong is now up to Part 5 of what is rapidly becoming a serious magnum opus.