There was a NY Times article about MMT that caused my Twitter timeline to explode. All I can say: read my book (MMT and the Recovery). (Also: please ignore all my incorrect prognostications about the current recovery, thanks.) Why buy my book? It’s cheap, at least the e-book edition. (The paperback has to cover more costs, so I can’t keep the MSRP too low. But even it is
Reporter Jeanna Smialek's premise is that now that significant inflation has appeared, "Ms. Kelton, and the movement she has come to represent, now seem anxious to control the narrative. The pandemic spending wasn’t entirely consistent with M.M.T principles, they say — it wasn’t assessed carefully for its inflationary effects as it was being drawn up, because it was crisis policy. But the situation has underlined how hard it is to know just where the economy’s constraints lay, and how difficult it is to fix things once you run into them."
Smialek's article is at least as much a typical Times personality profile as it is a discussion of MMT. It chronicles the many years which Kelton, Randy Wray and others spent on the fringes of academic economics discourse. She (Smialek) was favorably impressed with Kelton's appearance at the September 2018 MMT conference in New York City. However, she also quotes Larry Summers's Harvard sidekick, Jason Furman, to the effect of saying that because "MMT" has not come up with "a clear and obviously workable idea for how to stem inflation," it should be deemed discredited.
In your five bullet points above you have accurately characterized the context in which this article on Kelton and MMT is being read.
I don't buy the New York Times on Sundays, so I missed the article on Stephanie Kelton and MMT (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-monetary-theory-stephanie-kelton.html) yesterday. My coat was pulled to it by one of my programming language buddies (Perl, not Python, sorry), so I finished reading it just before notice of your blogpost appeared in my inbox.
Reporter Jeanna Smialek's premise is that now that significant inflation has appeared, "Ms. Kelton, and the movement she has come to represent, now seem anxious to control the narrative. The pandemic spending wasn’t entirely consistent with M.M.T principles, they say — it wasn’t assessed carefully for its inflationary effects as it was being drawn up, because it was crisis policy. But the situation has underlined how hard it is to know just where the economy’s constraints lay, and how difficult it is to fix things once you run into them."
Smialek's article is at least as much a typical Times personality profile as it is a discussion of MMT. It chronicles the many years which Kelton, Randy Wray and others spent on the fringes of academic economics discourse. She (Smialek) was favorably impressed with Kelton's appearance at the September 2018 MMT conference in New York City. However, she also quotes Larry Summers's Harvard sidekick, Jason Furman, to the effect of saying that because "MMT" has not come up with "a clear and obviously workable idea for how to stem inflation," it should be deemed discredited.
In your five bullet points above you have accurately characterized the context in which this article on Kelton and MMT is being read.
Thanks. Saw too much of this on Twitter. Seeing condescension from people who have been horribly wrong triggers me.