A Rant About Mainstream MMT Critics — Brian Romanchuk

I ran across a text written by an anonymous author who gives the air of being a neoclassical academic. I prefer not to link the article, as I do not want to draw attention to it. However, I just want to point out some salient features that seem to have become the stock response to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) by at least some neoclassicals. From the perspective of the philosophy of science, this is perhaps interesting.

I would divide the critiques of MMT into two major categories — bad faith bashing and good faith attempts that fail owing to lack of due diligence aka unprofessionalism, chiefly lack of acquaintance with the literature and failure to consider rebuttals to objections that have already been made. There is apparently little to no reputational risk is the economics profession and one has to question why that seems to be so. 

These folks seem not to want to really engage, or else they are only willing to engage in terms of the neoclassical paradigm without being aware of the objections to this paradigm based on erroneous assumptions, for instance. 

Of course, the MMT paradigm is "incorrect" in terms of the neoclassical and MMT economists have addressed this previously. Actually, this goes back to Keynes himself in his criticism of the econometrics ics of Tinbergen, for example, as well as showing how foundational assumptions of the modeling approach are wrong. 

It should be the neoclassical economists who are their back feet in the argument, based on the obvious failures of their forecasting, such as failing to foresee financial crisis brewing as a result of erroneous assumptions the relationship of economics and finance, e.g, loanable funds and neutral money.

And some of those that do offer "good faith" engagement demand that MMT economists take time to enlighten them personally when they themselves have not done their homework. Colloquially this is called "trolling."

Bond Economics
A Rant About Mainstream MMT Critics
Brian Romanchuk