Friday, November 27, 2020

A –> B –> C, Does A imply C? — Scott Sumner


Scott Sumner has more questions.

Maybe he should try trading Treasuries. He might discover something.

The Money Illusion
A –> B –> C, Does A imply C?
Scott Sumner | Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Also from SS
In Thanksgiving Message, Trump Says ‘We’re Like a Third-World Country’
Can't argue with that.

Trump concedes I was right all along

6 comments:

NeilW said...

What's the point in asking lots of questions if you don't want to adjust your viewpoint from the answers?

He's "Just Asking Questions"

<a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions>https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions</a>

Let the acolytes answer. There are more interesting things to discuss.

Jerry Brown said...

I read this. Neil is probably right. There's a small chance he is wrong. I will do the dopey thing while the geniuses discuss the more important interesting matters.

Matt Franko said...

“What's the point in asking lots of questions if you don't want to adjust your viewpoint from the answers?”

That’s science Neil: Test > Adjustment > Correction > Test > Adjustment > Correction > Test....

He’s doing Dialogic: Thesis vs Anti-Thesis...

None of these people are trained in Science... they’re unqualified to be working in anything having to do with our material systems administration or management..

Peter Pan said...

Leave Sumner to his safe space and hope that Biden won't hire him.

Matt Franko said...

He's "Just Asking Questions"

That’s just part of the dialogic method Neil... that’s how it’s supposed to work.., that’s how they are trained..,

Calgacus said...

The basic problem is that people like Sumner or Noah Smith actually believe that there is such a thing as mainstream macro, that is as intelligible, internally consistent, useful and true as say phlogiston or even caloric in physics, both of which led to solid physics, the first of which really does exist.

Though I think the MMTers make pedagogical mistakes, don't put and use some definitions prominently enough. And they know what they know so well that they don't understand some of the real difficulties of tyros or absences from current literature - most were personally educated by institutional economists who were the very few people in the world who correctly understood and remembered the genuine advances of the Keynesian era. Though all this, MMT is an internally consistent theory, true theory about the real world.

Mainstream is just word salad, that randomly changes definitions midstream if it bothers to make them at all, rather than laughing at those who dare to ask intelligent questions, nudge-nudging and pointing to equations which are of course meaningless without defining their terms. Uses "technical" terms "technically" in one place and then in common English meaning in another. Like a demented astrologer saying Venus is in the House of her friend Libra because she got evicted from Sagittarius after not paying her rent. You can't understand MMT in terms of mainstream macro - it is like trying to understand astronomy in terms of astrology, astrology on LSD.

You have to understand MMT first, forget whatever you lied to yourself that you understood - to "understand" (the confusions of) modern macro - which really is nothing but a confusion of the Keynesian advances shoe-horned into the earlier honest (neo)classical errors that Keynes etc was a revolt from. Time doesn't go backwards, so the only way to do this is by debauching definitions that way.