Defending Economics from Robert Samuelson - See Addendum on China and the Dollar

I am not usually inclined to defend the economics profession, but Robert Samuelson brings out my defensive impulse in his discussion of Financial Time columnist Martin Wolf's new book (which I have not read). Before getting to the main matter at hand, it's worth making a couple of other points.

First, Samuelson tells us that Wolf's explanation of the financial crisis goes via the way of the U.S. trade deficit:

"The trade-surplus countries couldn’t spend all their export earnings, so they plow...