On the Value of Novelty

While writing the last post I came over this by Paul Krugman:

“I should also mention that you don’t need to go back to Tobin 1975 to see serious academic analysis of the issue. Gautti Eggertson at the NY Fed has been doing yeoman work on all of this, for example here.”

Implying, to me at least, that there should be some intrinsic value to the freshness of the analysis. I concur that something new might well be more relevant, but then its the relevancy that makes it better and not the novelty. It is not at all given that the newest is the most relevant; it depends. 

I would much rather follow the somewhat impossible advise of Vicor Niederhoffer in his “The Education of a Speculator”, that you should only read books that are at least a hundred years old; it is first when they are still deemed valuable after so long that they have proven their real worth and quality.