Academic Pursuits

In a very strange post indeed, Greg Mankiw highlights ongoing lamentations among academic economists over cap-and-trade legislation. Who says modern intellectuals have evolved from the bad old days of arguing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? Haven't these guys heard the news - there is no more underlying fundamental need for cap and trade legislation, so why waste time debating its finer points? It seems cap-and-trade mechanisms have a rare quality of arcane interest to academics, and I guess it may even be pretty interesting if I thought about it enough, but I don't because cap-and-trade is a policy solution to a non-problem (that is getting more non-problemy as we speak).