The Naming of Dogs

A difficult matter: Why does Greg Mankiw have a dog named Tobin? In principle, there are two possible reasons:

(A) he wants to honor Tobin by naming a cherished pet after him;
(B) he wants to dishonor Tobin by naming a mere dog after him.

In practice, I’m sure it’s A, for several reasons (any of which would probably be sufficient):

1. The disrespect (to a Nobel laureate, no less) implied by B would be entirely out of character for Greg.

2. Greg used to have a dog named John Maynard Keynes. At the time, his main claim to fame was as one of the leaders of the “new Keynesian” school of macroeconomics, so it’s implausible that he would have wanted to dishonor Keynes. (It’s also implausible that he would have completely reversed his dog-naming policy subsequently.)

3. I was once at a talk by James Tobin, at which Greg asked a question in a tone that clearly indicated he did not regard Tobin as a dog.

(Actually, possibility C is that his wife named the dog, but I will ignore that possibility for now. Possibility D, which I reject out of hand, in part because of 2 above, is that the name refers to a different Tobin and has nothing to do with the famous economist.)

It seems odd to me that Greg would choose James Tobin out of all the possibilities. When I think about the two of them, it seems there are very few things on which they would agree (if Tobin were alive today). OK, “Keynes was a great economist,” and “Certain nominal quantities values are sticky in the short run.” But beyond that, they would probably disagree about which nominal quantities values (wages or prices), why they are sticky, how long they are sticky, whether the stickiness is symmetric, and so on. They would certainly disagree about the policy implications (e.g., active policy vs. fixed rule). Tobin certainly wouldn’t have taken (or been offered) a job in the Bush administration. Would Mankiw have taken (or been offered) a job in the Kennedy administration? Maybe, but it’s a stretch.

Of course, you can still have great admiration for someone with whom you disagree. But my sense is that there is more to it than that. I think that Greg regards James Tobin as his intellectual progenitor, as an earlier worker on the same project. Perhaps rightly so. I’m not sure what the implications are, but there seems to be some great irony to the whole situation.


UPDATE: I didn’t realize Greg posted on this same topic (sort of) today. Maybe there’s something in the air.

UPDATE2: ...and Greg responds (sort of).

UPDATE3: Shame on me for using the word "quantities" to refer to prices and wages. I really have to mind my P's and Q's.