Friday, March 29, 2013

Lord Keynes — Warren Mosler to debate Robert Murphy?

What little details available are here. This sounds very interesting, but Murphy seems a rather strange choice as a champion of Austrian economics.
Why? The reason is that Murphy is something of a maverick who thinks that the interest rate is a monetary phenomenon, both in his PhD Unanticipated Intertemporal Change in Theories of Interest (2003) and in this [link] post. That is, he rejects the widespread Austrian theory of interest: pure time preference theory.
More seriously, in this interesting paper and in this post, Murphy admits that Sraffa demonstrated that outside of equilibrium there is no single Wicksellian natural rate of interest, and that Hayek never really addressed this problem for his trade cycle theory.
On the face of it, these admissions have devastating consequences for virtually all modern formulations of the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) using the unique natural rate, as admitted by Murphy himself:
Social Democracy For The 21St Century
Warren Mosler to debate Robert Murphy?
Lord Keynes

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It all depends how is It carried out. On debates like this it is not that important who is right but who the audience thinks is right. Murphy has produced silly arguments against MMT so far. Coconuts and stuff. He is very afraid of Warren and he would rather not debate him, but he couldn't say no. He is a monetary illiterate, at least few years back he was talking about money multiplier and Fed creating the danger of inflation by doing QE, once banks start lending again.

Murphy would like to take the debate on unrealistic grounds, away from reality, fantacy freedom land. That's how most of the ideological Austrians argue any way. IMO he is not up to Warren and this is not going to be an interesting debate.Kind of like putting Bob Roddis against Warren, not as bad but still. Looking forward of seeing It though. Promotes MMT too. There is not even anything I can think to suggest to Warren, he is the best there is to present logical arguments.