The screenshot below is of a passage in a chapter written by Susanne Lohmann, a top UCLA political scientist, in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, which is edited by Barry Weingast, an even more senior political scientist at Stanford. Two things of note. First, Lohmann claims that the Yale economist William Nordhaus coined the phrase “political business cycle” in 1975. That’s untrue. As Nordhaus himself acknowledges in his 1975 article, it was in fact the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki who formulated the phrase, in 1943, in his article “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” But, second, by mistaking the authorship of the “political business cycle” idea, Lohmann erases its original meaning, or even the fact that it ever had […]