If you don't have a Ph.D. please don't bother us with your "sophomoric musings" ___ Since Ph.D.-flaunting economists can reasonably be assumed to be smart, Karthik Athreya, a specialist in macroeconomics and consumer finance who toils away in the bowels of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, probably knew that he was going to cause a ruckus when he published a broadside declaring the entire blogospheric discussion of economics irrelevant, useless, and dumb. Athreya's basic argument appears to be that only professional research economists should be allowed to discuss economics because, well, economics is really hard, and nobody else has...