Wednesday, March 28, 2012

JKH — Saving, Stock/Flow Consistency, and Kalecki


JKH takes on Bill Mitchell and MMT terminology.

Read it at Modern Monetary Realism
Saving, Stock/Flow Consistency, and Kalecki
by JKH

MMR is directly engaging MMT, which is the first coordinated instance of debate and therefore an encouraging sign of progress. While there have been other debate between economists and MMT, they have not be coordinated and sustained, and many have been rather superficial, since the opposing party was ill-informed about MMT. That seems to be changing.

It's always good to have a nemesis, or as the Native Americans termed it, a "tormentor." Keeps warriors sharp.

The overall issue here is twofold. First, it is getting the professional presentation correct. Secondly, it is about translating the professional presentation into terms that non-professionals can understand, so they can get some insight into the issues and how professionals deal with them.

For example, there are a great many books explaining quantum mechanics to non-physicists, but without the math one simply cannot understand QM. Most fields are like that. One needs the background and tools to grasp them, and simplified explanations are necessarily imperfect compromises. But they should be as accurate as possible without overly complicated matters to the degree that non-professionals cannot grasp them.

This is the different between blogs and introductory courses, and graduate study and professional work.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

JKH, Sankowski and Ramanan are all interesting and worth paying attention to. Colon Roach is not.

Anonymous said...

MMR = modern monetary robbers

MarioLa said...

Guys above, ad hominems are useless.

Anonymous said...

Actually, the only thing that's useless is the contribution that MMR adds to the discussion.

In fact, there is very little original thought on that site:

- no original graphs
- the "caffeine/breakfast" links aren't headlines, but a collection of old blog posts (lukewarm coffee anyone?)
- an anonymous author who pretends to know stuff
- lots of intellectual theft

Also, it can't be ad hominem if it's true.

MMR = modern money robbers

BTW, I actually thought the first person to comment was being nice.

MarioLa said...

I agree with you that MMR is disappointing. I also think that they basically started with stealing MMT insights (minus JG), rebranding them "miraculously" 'MMR' as if they themselves came up with this stuff and trying to ride on that. Their attempt at coming up with something original (A=B+C+(A-B-C)) fizzled, to say the least. All this is true, in my view. Yet it is better to point out these facts, persistently if needed, than calling them names. MMT has facts on its side, we don't need emotions or ad hominems, they are not necessary.