Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Bill Mitchell – When the idea of a fiscal surplus becomes a talisman

It is Wednesday and I am travelling a lot today with limited opportunity to write. I am reading a lot though. Highly significant political debates with far reaching effects on the well-being of citizens once policies are implemented are conducted on a daily basis in our national Parliaments and in the media with little correspondence to reality. This is the norm for debates on macroeconomics, which dominate political news every day. There is this fictional world that has been created to keep citizens in check. When the painful policies the neoliberals haul out inflict pain, the solution is to blame something erroneous, attack it, which then just causes more pain. This is the norm these days when it comes to macroeconomic policy. And for the rest of us we suffer in the real world but reason in this fictional world, which is why it persists.…
The perils of confusing conceptual models of the world with reality.

Most people don't have the skill in critical thinking that his required to critique a conceptual model and its framework (foundations), nor do they have the ability to think creatively enough to develop realistic models. In addition, vested interests promote flawed models and control narratives that advance their interests and the expense of the system.

Bill and Randy's macro textbook based on MMT has been called humorously the first non-fictional textbook on macroeconomics. Most macro is not science, but science fiction.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
When the idea of a fiscal surplus becomes a talisman
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

13 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"vested interests promote flawed models and control narratives that advance their interests and the expense of the system."

Conspiracy theory...

Matt Franko said...

"confusing conceptual models of the world with reality"

Its called a Reification Error and its pretty commonplace cognitive error...

It happens in people who are not trained/qualified in methods of abstraction ie the non-STEM trained platonistic Liberal Art Degree (moron) people...

They dont understand the Finance and Accounting abstractions so they default to think the abstractions are real... "we're out of money!", "Fed is injecting money!", "Fed is pumping in liquidity!", etc... happens all the time...

Euthanize the platonistic and all of this goes away...

Peter Pan said...

This is the same Bill Mitchell who has noticed a shift in emphasis towards fiscal policy. These must be the stragglers.

Matt Franko said...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

“Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.[1][2] In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory".

They’re all unqualified... all incompetent...

S400 said...

“ don't have the skill in critical thinking that his required to critique a conceptual model and its framework “

Matt Franko in a nutshell.

Matt Franko said...

I’m not a Platonist...

Platonists “critique!” ,it’s called the ‘dialectic method’. think of the old Socratic dialogs.. . these morons argue back and forth in a dialog ‘critiquing’ the others thesis... eventually the people die and their survivors synthesize the opposing thesis into a new thesis combining parts of each of the opposing thesis...

You have the “neoclassical synthesis”, etc...

Neither theses are ever tested and technically evaluated for accuracy...

So no I don’t ‘critique!” wtf...

If you come across two morons arguing with each other, the move isn’t to jump in on the one side....

Matt Franko said...

eg the biggest complaint from the MMT people (100% Platonist) is always “you didn’t read our literature!”... not that the other thesis they are opposing is inaccurate or has no predictive value...

Our Tom here is a Platonists Platonist (PhD in Philosophy from Jesuit Georgetown) . so ofc his biggest complaining is a lack of “critique!” ... it’s all about the dogmatic advocacy for one’s thesis in a dialectic exchange... never predictive value...

Peter Pan said...

Once these people receive the memo that monetary policy is on the way out, and fiscal policy is becoming de rigueur, they will switch gears.

André said...

"It happens in people who are not trained/qualified in methods of abstraction ie the non-STEM trained platonistic Liberal Art Degree (moron) people"

So why almost every engineer defends the neoliberal agenda? Maybe because it isn't restricted to Liberal Art Degrees?

"eg the biggest complaint from the MMT people (100% Platonist) is always “you didn’t read our literature!”"

No, the biggest complaint from the MMT people is that mainstream economics don't conform to the real world

Ryan Harris said...

The decisoon isn't between communist MMT cranks and Neoliberal cranks... Those are just the noisiest most obnoxious attention seekers

S400 said...

“The decisoon isn't between communist MMT cranks and Neoliberal cranks..”

You forgot the right wing nut jobs, the the noisiest most obnoxious attention seekers of them all.

Two names come to mind instantly, Ryan and Matt....

S400 said...

“ . these morons argue back and forth in a dialog ‘critiquing’ the others thesis...”

Matt arguing....

Ryan Harris said...

Hah. Yeah. Science. Accounting. Engineering stands in the way spinning good yarns. Realism can be mundane and boring but looms large in the imagination none the less.