EX OCCIDENTE FLUX. A DEBATE ON THE USEFULNESS OF MACROECONOMICS AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ECONOMICS (Ex occidente flux. Vita a makrookonomia hasznarol es a kozgazdasagtan felelossegerol)

Scholarly debate on a blog? A short exposition, indicative references, hasty conclusions. A personal note, a wisecrack or two, a feel of 'work in progress'. It is no easy task for a chronicler to approach the new genre with the traditional tools of intellectual historiography and go for analysis instead of loose blog comments: seeking causes, attempting a typology, making comparisons, sometimes taking seriously notes not seriously intended. For it would be a luxury to leave to swift oblivion on the net a sequence of texts over 200,000 characters long, of a scholarly standard far higher than most open exchanges in Hungarian economics. The attempt is made on the recent macroeconomics debate on the ELTECON blog. Not as a conclusion to the debate or a summary of it, rather as a snapshot of what one prestigious group of Hungarian theoretical economists think of the quality and responsibility of their profession. Amidst the irritating clamour of economic crisis. The snapshot is taken at an unusual time, when the beam of the West is hardly shining. In this curious light, the article seeks to answer three questions: 1. Has the crisis affected the debaters' opinions on the scientific and moral value of their models? 2. How firmly are these opinions grounded on scientific principles? 3. Do they have a strong local tinge to them? All in all, are the debaters' macroeconomic arguments convincing in themselves? The author leaves better qualified observers to decide that.