Sunday, May 20, 2018

Everything New Is Old Fiction

Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington

...Kelton’s core idea ― that the government can’t run out of money or go bankrupt, no matter how much it spends ― hasn’t really changed since the days when Buiter and Krugman were trashing her thinking. But it seems the world has. Today she is a full-fledged member of the American power elite, juggling television bookings with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Bloomberg TV’s Joe Wiesenthal, writing op-eds for The New York Times and being quoted in The Wall Street Journal...
 It continues to amaze me that old, recycled ideas are "discovered" by bloggers and politicians and suddenly someone is a genius. Anyone with a smidgen of prognostication could sit back in the 70s and go "What is the logical outgrowth of computers and robotics" and arrive at the conclusion that jobs are going to disappear. The next question, of course, becomes what do we do with all the unemployed people? Solutions vary but the "government job" seems the less onerous and more likely of all the various ideas, which range from the medieval to the ridiculous. All this points toward a favorite hobby horse of mine--- that the deficit doesn't matter because the government can print all the money it wants to and inflation will inevitably lag behind the money supply.

As always, the science fiction writers arrived long before the "scientists." Go here for a reading list.