Scott T. Fullwiler — Krugman Gives DeGrauwe 2011 Credit for What MMT Has Argued for 15+ Years

How the mainstream marginalizes and excludes heterodoxy. It is beyond unprofessional among scholars not to acknowledge previous constitutions correctly. As someone from another discipline, I am left scratching my head.

Are economists actually serious about their profession, and do that expect to be be taken seriously by other scholars? It seems not. And this appropriation of others published ideas without citation is a just one item on a long list of professional failure and ethical conflicts of interest.

I suspect that Krugman and others answer is that heterodoxy is not published in the "recognized" venues, so there is no obligation of the mainstream to stay a abreast of what heterodoxy is doing. Well, heterodoxy is by definition excluded from the "recognized" venues, so this is a circular argument. It suggests that the mainstream will either never change, or if it does it will by appropriating to itself the contributions of others without proper acknowledgement and citation of sources.

New Economic Perspectives
Krugman Gives DeGrauwe 2011 Credit for What MMT Has Argued for 15+ Years
Scott T. Fullwiler | James A. Leach Chair in Banking and Monetary Economics and is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College

See also Thomas Palley, Paul Krugman, the Phillips Curve and gattopardo economics (implicitly wonkish also)

Paul Krugman writes in his blog “I do believe that Palley is on the right track here, because it’s pretty much the same track a number of us have been following for the past few years.”

I very much welcome the approval of my distinguished colleague, but it strikes me as a little patronizing. The model of nominal wage rigidity and the Phillips curve that I described comes from my 1990 dissertation, was published in January 1994, and has been followed by substantial further published research.

The same issue of precedence holds for scholarship on debt-driven business cycles, financial instability, the problem of debt-deflation in recessions and depressions, and the endogenous credit-driven nature of the money supply. These are all issues my colleagues and I, working in the Post- and old Keynesian traditions, have been writing about for years – No, decades!….

Since 2008, a few “new Keynesian” economists have discovered these same issues and are developing very similar analyses. However, almost nowhere will you find citation of this prior work, except for citation of a few absolutely seminal contributors (like Tobin and Minsky). 

That pattern of citation connects with my earlier exchange with Paul Krugman regarding gattopardo economics [Here and Here]. By citing the seminal critical thinkers, mainstream economists lay claim to the intellectual lineage. And by overlooking more recent work, they capture the arguments of their critics.

This practice has enormous consequences.…