Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Philip Pilkington — Palley’s Critique of MMT: Post Keynesian or neo-Keynesian?

So, Tom Palley has a new criticism out of MMT. Frankly, I’m not hugely concerned with the critique itself. The criticisms are old and I don’t think that Palley will convince anyone of the ills of MMT that are not already convinced (it’s that type of paper…).

What I have been wondering, however, is what to make of the substance of the paper itself. What I mean is: is this a Post-Keynesian critique of MMT? Or is it something else? I’m not sure that I want to answer that question just yet. For now I’m content to raise it.
Fixing the Economists
Palley’s Critique of MMT: Post Keynesian or neo-Keynesian?
Philip Pilkington

2 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

Palley says there’s nothing new in MMT. MMTers themselves largely go along with that. That is MMTers normally admit they are simply repeating the ideas of Keynes and especially Abba Lerner. So what?

There were people in Russia prior to the collapse of communism campaigning for democracy. I never criticised them by pointing out that democracy was an idea thought up in Ancient Athens about 2,000 years ago. I’ll continue to call myself an MMTer while admitting that there is very little in MMT that is strictly speaking original.

Tom Hickey said...

The point is that even though many of these bozos may know about the creators of these ideas originally, they aren't voicing them or writing papers about them.

I'm with Phil on this one. When I perused the Pally paper my immediate thought was, "Where's your New Keynesian model? — WTF?"