A footnote to Butler's post below on Aaron Director. While I have no doubt that Butler's undergraduate classes in Keynesian economics were indeed dismal, Carlyle's famous "dismal science" remark was not, contrary to popular myth, directed at Malthus and his dreary worldview. In fact, what Carlyle hated was libertarianism, which he rightly associated with the classical economists. I recently blogged about this at Organizations and Markets.
