There are a few contenders for most complicated thing ever made: the internet is a network of glass and metal and radiation that lets a bunch of thinking rocks work together; the ISS is a giant...
There are a few contenders for most complicated thing ever made: the internet is a network of glass and metal and radiation that lets a bunch of thinking rocks work together; the ISS is a giant floating house above the sky that you can only visit by falling sideways so fast you miss the ground; the electrical grid takes photons and exploding atoms and falling things and super-flammable ancient plants and turns them into an almost magically useful energy that lives in our walls. One less obvious candidate though, because of its sheer ubiquity in our lives, is that thing which is whatever economics tries to describe.
Think on it for a moment: for at least 10,000 years we've been developing a globe spanning social technology that dictates how we distribute our resources, how we work together, and even how we spend most of our day. Its construction has been ad hoc and accidental and planned, piecemeal and distributed and unified, spanning time and space with different parts of the system disappearing and growing and interacting in unpredictable ways. Money, debt, corporations, banks, etc. are all part of this system and cannot be described or understood individually without considering the whole.
All of which is to say: this is complicated. I haven't heard of MMT before and I don't know if it will become as influential as the article says it might, but one thing that is clear is that this system we live with that dictates our lives could be about to change. There is hope in this because maybe things will be better, but it's worrying as well because I don't think we really know what we're doing. If we were building a bridge we could hire engineers and know from physics and experience what would be safe so that we could make a structure that wouldn't collapse under us, but for building our system around a new economic paradigm we don't have those kind of guarantees.
have we ever? sure, there are fundamental economic principles--but there are also, what, at least six major competing schools of economic theory, not accounting for marxist frameworks of economics...
but it's worrying as well because I don't think we really know what we're doing
have we ever? sure, there are fundamental economic principles--but there are also, what, at least six major competing schools of economic theory, not accounting for marxist frameworks of economics or MMT? i'm pretty sure most economists, at the end of the day, don't really know that much more than you or i necessarily do about what the fuck is going on because of how abstract economics is beyond a certain point--they're just better at knowing what to look out for than a person who isn't versed in economics is. otherwise, there'd probably be a lot fewer competing theories of how economics works or how to apply it off paper.
Not really. The majority of working economists have generally agreed on a lot of foundational stuff for decades. See for example Goodfriend-King The New Neoclassical Synthesis and the Role of...
but there are also, what, at least six major competing schools of economic theory
Not really. The majority of working economists have generally agreed on a lot of foundational stuff for decades. See for example Goodfriend-King The New Neoclassical Synthesis and the Role of Monetary Policy. Stuff like (new/neo-)Keynesianism and monetarism and the micro-economic models have all been gutted for working parts and merged. The split is generally "orthodox" vs "heterodox", where heterodox is a broad category containing Marxian economics, MMT, Austrian economics, and some others. Heterodox doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, just that the majority of economists don't find it convincing. There are respected Marxian economists (offhand Janos Kornai), for example. Austrian economics on the other hand... that field has seen better days.
There are a few contenders for most complicated thing ever made: the internet is a network of glass and metal and radiation that lets a bunch of thinking rocks work together; the ISS is a giant floating house above the sky that you can only visit by falling sideways so fast you miss the ground; the electrical grid takes photons and exploding atoms and falling things and super-flammable ancient plants and turns them into an almost magically useful energy that lives in our walls. One less obvious candidate though, because of its sheer ubiquity in our lives, is that thing which is whatever economics tries to describe.
Think on it for a moment: for at least 10,000 years we've been developing a globe spanning social technology that dictates how we distribute our resources, how we work together, and even how we spend most of our day. Its construction has been ad hoc and accidental and planned, piecemeal and distributed and unified, spanning time and space with different parts of the system disappearing and growing and interacting in unpredictable ways. Money, debt, corporations, banks, etc. are all part of this system and cannot be described or understood individually without considering the whole.
All of which is to say: this is complicated. I haven't heard of MMT before and I don't know if it will become as influential as the article says it might, but one thing that is clear is that this system we live with that dictates our lives could be about to change. There is hope in this because maybe things will be better, but it's worrying as well because I don't think we really know what we're doing. If we were building a bridge we could hire engineers and know from physics and experience what would be safe so that we could make a structure that wouldn't collapse under us, but for building our system around a new economic paradigm we don't have those kind of guarantees.
Buckle up, I guess.
have we ever? sure, there are fundamental economic principles--but there are also, what, at least six major competing schools of economic theory, not accounting for marxist frameworks of economics or MMT? i'm pretty sure most economists, at the end of the day, don't really know that much more than you or i necessarily do about what the fuck is going on because of how abstract economics is beyond a certain point--they're just better at knowing what to look out for than a person who isn't versed in economics is. otherwise, there'd probably be a lot fewer competing theories of how economics works or how to apply it off paper.
Not really. The majority of working economists have generally agreed on a lot of foundational stuff for decades. See for example Goodfriend-King The New Neoclassical Synthesis and the Role of Monetary Policy. Stuff like (new/neo-)Keynesianism and monetarism and the micro-economic models have all been gutted for working parts and merged. The split is generally "orthodox" vs "heterodox", where heterodox is a broad category containing Marxian economics, MMT, Austrian economics, and some others. Heterodox doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, just that the majority of economists don't find it convincing. There are respected Marxian economists (offhand Janos Kornai), for example. Austrian economics on the other hand... that field has seen better days.