Thursday, March 8, 2012
Randy Wray — Disagreements Among Reasonable People: Response To MMT For Austrians #3
This post is more conciliatory. Actually, it sort of comes around to where John Carney started out at Net Net, in suggesting that MMTers and Austrians should explore what they share in common, like opposition to collusion of government and business, instead of concentrating on differences, where they will likely never agree. Randy also suggests that there is no contradiction involved in Austrians accepting MMT operational description of the existing monetary system, as Edward Harrison has done and apparently John Carney also.
Randy also deals with who is welcome and who is not. It's a matter of distinguishing those interested in sincere debate from those who are just trolling, some of whom are probably employed to do so while others just want to disrupt activity they don't like. While Randy doesn't say it, the remedy is not to feed the trolls and to ban the ones that persist in being uncivil after being warned. Many of these people claim to be Libertarians, but they seem to want to impinge on others' freedom of expression by flooding a debate with irrelevance, making it difficult to carry on debate on in that kind of environment due to the sheer volume of distraction. Fortunately, we haven't run into that problem here, and we have some Libertarians and Austrians who are welcome and included.
Read it at New Economic Perspectives
Blog #39 Disagreements Among Reasonable People: Response To MMT For Austrians #3
by L. Randall Wray
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11 comments:
Can I just say that I find all of these cat fights and forays into intellectual politics and to be a massive distraction from the business of promoting economic health through clearer economic thinking? Who cares who is "welcome", who is "in" and who is "out"? As Carney has said, he's a big boy whose skin is thick enough to endure criticism.
If people write stuff you agree with, then agree with it. If people write stuff you disagree with, then disagree with it. Do we need to soap opera too?
There may be reasonable 'austrians' but most 'austrians' are not reasonable, is a waste of time all this exercise. The lenses 'austrians' use to watch the world are radically opposed to what MMT use.
A real 'austrian' (not a neocon, conservative or neoliberal, which are not the same things) would never agree on the existence of a central bank, nor a monopoly of the state on the currency or even on the role the government plays on the economy. They wouldn't agree with the notion governments can and should deficit spend the money into the system etc. In fact taht's what most 'austrians' will be against, because its what is consistent with their ideology.
Hell, you can see that on Ron Paul types. Is not about being right or wrong, is about agreeing on the fundamental design of the monetary and banking system and the place of money in society and how its issued/used, there is no place to reconciliation when MMT is building on the current operational framework and 'austrianism' blames the framework on all the economic problems we have!
I doubt Carney is an austrian anyway, he probably is closer to a neoliberal type. But I don't follow the guy so don't know which exactly is his position on all this I've commented.
Debate is about resolving issues not personalities or dogmatically asserting pet ideas. All substantive contributions advance the debate, no matter how unpopular with some of the participants, even a majority of them.
The froth is about ego-assertion or intentional disruption. It has no place in a debate, and that goes for endlessly repeating matters that have been stated previously without adding anything substantive.
So let's stay focused on the debate substantively and in a civil manner.
Leverage,
I don't think I'm a neo-liberal. I've definitely spent years thinking about economics in the Austrian tradition. I think that it has a lot to offer economics in general and MMT in particular. The focus on subjectivity of value and knowledge problems is particularly useful.
Many Austrians are aspirational world-changers, as are many MMTers. You hope to improve the world. I'm not a world-improver. I think we're down with any number of ailments and likely to stay that way.
So I'm mostly interested in just telling stories about what's happening in the world, trying to discover why stuff happens, and figuring out the way things work.
I agree with Leverage. Remember how Bob Murphy was talking about private sector seving coconuts. This is obvius sign of denial. Now take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l1YCgRbEUp0
Austrians' hatred of current monetary system completly blinds them and they are not willing to learn anything. Carney is not Austrian, at least not a regular one.
In a way It is good that Murphy is discrediting himself and he has.
The focus on subjectivity of value and knowledge problems is particularly useful.
John I agree with you on the point about the usefulness of these parts of Austrian economics. Everyone should read von Mises and Hayek and take away the good parts from them.
The problem is that contemporary Austrians have elevated the knowledge problem into a sort of kneejerk affirmation of organizational incompetence and impotence. From their perspective on the all-powerful role of "unforeseen consequences", it becomes impossible to understand even how a CEO can succeed in setting and hitting a significant strategic organizational target, let alone how a government could successfully prosecute a global war on six continents, or succeed within the space of a decade in blowing through the boundaries of existing technological capabilities and landing men safely on the moon.
The Austians I talk to have a real aversion to empirical inquiry and seem unwilling to study actual institutional structures, preferring instead a highly rationalistic, almost metaphysical, model of how they think the economic system works. Libertarian thought is also larded up with a fanatical moralism about the evil of every form of coercion, which makes it hard for them to engage as mature adults about practical solutions to practical problems in an imperfect world.
They also don't seem to have a very lively sense of the many ways in which a large collection of isolated economic agents, each doing their locally optimizing thing in their local sphere of action, can produce an aggregate result that is catastrophically bad.
This is too good. Wray spends the last few days writing immature stories about his critics, rips into John Carney and all but calls him a "retard" (like he did with other people) and now he writes another childish piece blaming his readers for not understanding and calls it "conciliatory".
This guy needs to learn when to stop typing. He's done more harm than good.
It's just a blog LVG you little child. Go and read some books.
The problem for US 'libertarians' is that their country is essentially built on the systematic theft of land from the native american population. All true US 'libertarians' should pack their bags and leave.
Civility takes a lot of discipline. Some rules which most in the blogosphere don't follow: http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950/2004/06/03.html#a21
I try to follow them. But I also believe in reciprocity, rather than turning the other cheek. So it's tricky.
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