Friday, August 24, 2018
Brad DeLong — This is, I think, both right and wrong. China has an... interesting property-rights system—your property is secure not ...
Beginning to figure out how China works and why Western expectations have been consistently wrong about China' stability and resilience. The post addresses much more than property rights.
More evidence that the Chinese leadership groks the basics of MMT?
Grasping Reality
This is, I think, both right and wrong. China has an... interesting property-rights system—your property is secure not ...
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley
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5 comments:
Meh. MMT is really just Keynesianism (without the crap, as Ralph says). I have a book pdf somewhere on a hard drive by a Chinese author that gives a lot of credit to the advice that old Keynesians or institutionalists or whatever like James Tobin or James Galbraith who came to China for a while. Other names I forget. I mean, governments in the West had decided to listen to quacks and crazies, so these old guys (JG wasn't so old) had a lot of time on their hands.
I mean it is amazing how quickly people can learn things and make progress- in the rare but extremely important case - where the teacher actually knows something and the student is actually interested in learning.
“where the teacher actually knows something and the student is actually interested in learning.”
That’s the Didactic method... what if for instance the Dialectic method is being used instead within the Discipline?
Also who is to objectively judge whether “the teacher actually knows something”? How does that work? Who is the authority?
Competing Theories:
“there are three basic philosophies of macroeconomic stabilization.... Keynesianism, which centers around fiscal stimulus, mainly in the form of increased government spending.... Monetarism, which holds that getting economies out of recession is the job of the central bank, which can lower interest rates.... [Liquidationism holds] that recessions are a healthy and normal phenomenon... ”
MMT is another one...
None of this is scientific....
You sure wouldn't want the folks who slaughtered 50 million of their own citizens to be "revenue constrained". Would you?
I have always considered the potential of "MMT in action" to be a moral abomination. Its primary purpose is to allow government action without the benefit of an actual and expressed consensus and to steal the purchasing power from those in society with the least amount of political power.
1. If there is a total consensus to accomplish some goal, then there is no need for politics to accomplish the goal.
2. If there is a smaller consensus to accomplish some goal, politics allows that much smaller consensus to win the day. Suppose a population where only 35% of the people vote. The winning vote would be 18% of the actual population. That is the type of consensus which exists in a normal democracy.
3. Suppose that there is no electoral consensus to collect taxes to pay for a particular goal. MMT allows the rulers the ability "purchase" assets for the state simply by creating fiat money, thereby diluting the purchasing power of the those holding the existing money. All to accomplish goals for which there is no actual consensus. That's why statists love it so much.
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