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Sussurator's avatar

At some point, it's no longer a question of economists in high places doing bad science and making mistakes. It becomes clear it's a matter of political economy.

In political economy, we know that the political desires of anyone but wealthy people have no impact on what gets through Congress. But this same class of people and their Wall Street minions enjoy enormous soft power. (I'm sure you've noticed that it's difficult to get people to understand MMT when they are paid not to understand it, but it's even harder when they have unshakable prior ideological commitments to not understanding it, and when their friendships and professional status requires circling the wagon against outsiders in defense of orthodoxy)

In any case, soft power emanates from Wall Street through through public and specialist media to form an iron cage of orthodoxy inside which Powell comfortably lives.

It's unclear to me in a number of policy areas what to do when the people you're debating pretend to be engaging in an proper good-faith discourse, but their true opinions are as immovable as the Pope's commitment to the catechism.

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Dan Moerman's avatar

Hi Stephanie. Your arguments here seem to me crystal clear. I’m an old man. I’ve been thru this before… serious inflation in the seventies, thousands thrown out of work, years of suffering until things got back to “normal.” Don’t economists have memories? Aren’t, say, the 70s “data?” Where does “unemployment compensation” come from, the guardian angel? This happens over and over. Why don’t economists…. Mmt folks excluded … live in the world? Oh, I see they live at Yale,

Harvard, at Stanford, et Al., and they aren’t unemployed. That explains it. Dan.

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