by Does MMT — really — ignore expectations? In his latest diatribe against MMT, Thomas Palley argues that there is an “inflationary bias” in MMT, that its framework “is static and has little to say about how policy affects expectations of the future,” “is silent on asset price formation,” and “ignores expectations and treats private markets as irrelevant.” Hmmm … Yours truly has to confess it is extremely difficult to recognize that description. Given its roots in the writings of Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, it is, to say the least, rather amazing to attribute those views to MMT. Let me just quote one source to show how ill-founded Palley’s critique is on this issue: While the IS-LM approach of John Hicks tried to represent what he saw as the key elements
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Does MMT — really — ignore expectations?
In his latest diatribe against MMT, Thomas Palley argues that there is an “inflationary bias” in MMT, that its framework “is static and has little to say about how policy affects expectations of the future,” “is silent on asset price formation,” and “ignores expectations and treats private markets as irrelevant.”
Hmmm …
Yours truly has to confess it is extremely difficult to recognize that description. Given its roots in the writings of Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, it is, to say the least, rather amazing to attribute those views to MMT. Let me just quote one source to show how ill-founded Palley’s critique is on this issue:
While the IS-LM approach of John Hicks tried to represent what he saw as the key elements of Keynes’ General Theory, it is clear he left out issues relating to uncertainty and probability that Keynes saw as being crucial in the way that long-term expectations were formed … The decision to invest is dependent on the ‘state of long-term expectation,’ which is ignored in the static IS-LM approach … Investment, among other key economic decisions, is a forward-looking process … The failure to include the crucial role of expectations and historical time means that the IS-LM framework is reduced to presenting a general equilibrium static solution that has little place in a dynamic system where uncertainty is a key driver in economic decision making.