Monday, April 2, 2012

Why MMT will win the battle and lose the war

MMT is going to win the battle and loose the war. Orthodoxy has demonstrated itself to be extremely flexible when confronted with serious theoretical challenges such as the capital controversies, acknowledging its short comings and then returning to the central narrative. It has done the same with empirical short comings as well. In each case, it has first responded with derisive missives, then acknowledged in a limited sense its own short comings and then invented a work around so that it can come back to the basic glib classical proposition: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and any attempt to fuck with ‘nature’ is folly. 
This view has always served as an ideological resource ready hand. The benefactors don’t really care if it is true in some narrow technical sense. That is not why they pay the rent and heating for the incubation of such thought.
Read it at Relentlessly Progressive Political Economy
by Travis Fast
(h/t Clonal Antibody via email)

Ravi Batra makes the same point. In an age dominated by the acquisitive mindset, those of intellectual mindset who are smart and ambitious serve the interests of the Grand Acquisitors by providing "expert testimony" that justifies the rationale for a few being so privileged. They are amply rewarded for their dedicated service.

6 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Tom,

I dont understand this part here:

" it can come back to the basic glib classical proposition: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and any attempt to fuck with ‘nature’ is folly.
This view has always served as an ideological resource ready hand. The benefactors don’t really care if it is true in some narrow technical sense."

What is "nature"? Is he (Fast) talking about "the invisible hand"?
Is he looking at "the invisible hand" as "nature"?

Resp,

Tom Hickey said...

Yes. The idea that markets are self-regulating is the basis of neoliberalism. This means that money is neutral, i.e., a veil over what is essentially a barter system in which markets eventually clear through adjustment of bids and offers to a strike price.

mike norman said...

"Nature" is the neolib order. It behooves those in power to keep that system functioning. Democracy is overrated.

mike norman said...

I agree that MMT will lose the war and that's because the leaders of MMT are too interested in conducting academic tit-for-tats rather than getting "dirty" with some good ol' marketiing and salesmanship. These guys should be calling up TV producers (like i do), PR firms, search engine optimization outfits to get the word out.

Google MMT, and you're gonna find Cullen Roche's website as the first listing. He's not even MMT. That's really poor. Why isn't ONE major MMTer ending up on the first page of a Google search??

Travis Fast said...

I single scare quoted nature because there is a deep seated notion of nature at work in the neoclassical ontology. Most of this view, I would argue, can be traced back to classical liberal attempts to justify substitute bourgeois privilege for aristocratic privilege. We must remember that liberals once were radicals hell bent on destroying the vestiges of feudalism. In that gambit they needed to paint their vision for the social, economic and political ordering of society as corresponding to nature. Aristocrats had of course justified their privilege in terms of the natural order of things too. Even Marx couched the need for communism in terms of man's (sic) nature. Although Marx's version of man's nature was of a different sort.

In any case, today, outside of mainstream economics departments, most social scientists cringe when people couch their arguments in essentialist (fixed, given by god or genetics)axiomatic starting assumptions. In fact most of us view the recourse to nature as evidence of a bad argument. Mainstream economists can't help themselves. They talk about natural rates of interest, natural rates of unemployment etc. The implication being that you can't fuck with the laws of nature. Try to push unemployment below its natural rate and the inflation gods will smoot you.

Thanks Tom for linking to my post.

Travis said...

I wrote a little rant about natural here some weeks back.
http://rppe.org/one-word-i-wish-liberal-economists-would-stop-using/