Wolf eats the Salmon

Our bubbly economists may be on the march, but at least they're not as uppity as some of their British cousins. The pages of the New York Times were the scene of a rather gilded dust-up recently between the well-known economic commentator Felix Salmon and the Financial Times's economic guru Martin Wolf.

Salmon recently reviewed Wolf's book on the financial crisis, The Shifts and The Shocks for the NYT. Salmon teased the old master somewhat for his tendency to resort to elitist jargon.

“Given the choice between precision and ease of understanding, Wolf will always choose precision . . .“real unit labour costs” instead of wages . . . You would need to be a very devoted Wolf fan to wade through hundreds of pages of such material”.

A clearly stung Wolf, known affectionately in some London circles as Sir Martin, had a letter published in the NYT explaining that he is "guilty of the crime". He justified it with yet more wonkish jargon and queried whether Salmon, if he could not accept the nuances, was "qualified" to review his book. Attaché cases at dawn, then?