Like a Virgin

With apologies to Madonna, my International Economics professor - a renouned old-school trade theorist - was very pleased to go around the room this evening and learn that only two or three in his large class had taken any Trade before. The rest of us, he said happily, are virgins. Or, more precisely, were. He began as the embattled expert always does, boxing at the shadows of the New Trade Theorists he has been warring with since the early 1980's. Little did he know... we barely knew what he was talking about! Without first having read Krugman (once a leading economist, now a second-rate blogger, basically) or Brander or Helpman, how were we to know that the good-old-fashioned theories of trade were under assault? It makes Old Snapping Turtle seem like he's fighting straw-man arguments. The same thing happened last semester under the last of the Warriors of the Real Business Cycle, who was so combative in lectures that I'd sometimes look over my shoulder half expecting to see the ghost of John Maynard Keynes wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.