Archive for MMT
Ludwig von Mises 1, Abba Lerner 0
I am working on my article for this month’s Lara-Murphy Report. (Carlos had mentioned that he been reading Human Action lately, and noticed that Mises talks matter-of-factly about people saving via insurance policies, so I’m elaborating on that phenomenon.) I came across this passage (pp. 843-844) which made me feel dumb: In the process of [...]
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* Bob Wenzel has some concerns about gold confiscation, if the feds get serious. In short: It’s hard to hide a bunch of metal, since there are detectors built specifically for that purpose. * Russ Roberts interviews Nassim Taleb. I will always like Taleb, because he answered my emails back in the day and even [...]
Read moreFuture Generations Will Be Indebted to Me for the Clarity of This Exposition
OK my piece de resistance. I’m going to post this on Facebook, so let me start from scratch: I am responding to Paul Krugman’s recent claims on why the standard political debate on the government debt is totally wrong-headed. (For a good summary of his position, see this NYT piece.) Specifically, Krugman conceded that if [...]
Read moreMurphy, Former Disciple of Abba Lerner
I think I’ve got this debt stuff resolved, after spending about a week on an intellectual odyssey. This is truly one of the biggest shifts in my thinking on something that I thought I had down pat, in my life. First, let’s go to Nick Rowe’s taxonomy of the various positions one could hold on [...]
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I’m still buried with “day job” work, but at this point I have so many tabs on my Firefox browser that it’s slowing me down. So this post is an investment in my future productivity, see. * Glenn Greenwald once again delivers a very fair assessment of the political culture. It’s really impressive that GG [...]
Read moreWolf vs. Krugman: Separating the Economist From the (Bad) Accountant
Not surprisingly, both my allies and critics seem to be missing the point of my previous post on Krugman and (alleged) accounting identities. So some clarification is in order. First, here’s a simple one I made in the comments on the definition of income: If I do a consulting project for a guy and he [...]
Read moreKrugman Promises to Reconcile Himself at a Date TBD
Ah, I’m glad to see some people are apparently busting Krugman in the comments of his blog about an apparent inconsistent (dare I say Kontradiction?). For a while Krugman has been ripping on the people worrying about deficits, by pointing to other countries that have higher debt-to-GDP ratios than the US does. Here’s a good [...]
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Lots of links have been piling up here… * You know how Keynesians liked that one journal article showing that businesses were more worried about bad sales than regulations? Well, when a survey shows the exact opposite, they still take it as further evidence that the demand-side story is right. (Note that I’m not saying [...]
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