Saltwater

Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade.

2012, John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, Princeton University Press (expanded paperback ed., 1st ed. from 2010), →ISBN, page 86. Despite their often heated debates, saltwater and freshwater economists agreed on one fundamental point: that macroeconomic analysis must be based on the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics.

Sweetwater and Saltwater economists tend to differ on policy issues.

These findings suggest that the divide between fresh and saltwater departments has all but disappeared. The ideological battle is over.

In the US, economists were said to be from sweetwater departments – from Chicago and Minnesota, where they were new classical – and from saltwater departments – MIT, Harvard and Yale, where they continued to be Keynesians who did not concede the ground totally to the new classical economists.

A tax rate of say, 91 per cent – as suggested by the very saltwater Nobel Prizewinner, economist Paul Krugman – would force Americans to hand over a much larger proportion of their income than most are comfortable with.