I can only give a secondhand perception—from people (including economists) offhandedly discussing in blogs, social media, etc, MMT appears to be crankery that sometimes violates economic knowledge, but sometimes is so vaguely defined that it’s “not even wrong”.
If this is true, seeing it published under “Future Perfect” is worrying .
I didn’t read the Future Perfect article as being especially supportive (though I only skimmed the middle portions). It seemed like a fairly neutral report on “something a lot of people on our side of the political spectrum care about”. Did I miss a portion of the article that actually advocated for the idea?
For the record, I think it’s best to ignore Future Perfect articles that don’t have any obvious bearing on EA causes (unless they seem actively damaging to EA) because something like half their work fits that description and I don’t think that’s going to change.
I agree with Aaron, though I might be more in favor than most people of “high-quality EA Forum discussion of things that are important for how the world works but aren’t obviously EA-flavored or actionable”. Vox probably isn’t a great source for topics, but I do think EA should be branching out increasingly into topics that don’t feel EA-ish, to build up models and questions that might feed into interventions further down the road.
I can only give a secondhand perception—from people (including economists) offhandedly discussing in blogs, social media, etc, MMT appears to be crankery that sometimes violates economic knowledge, but sometimes is so vaguely defined that it’s “not even wrong”.
If this is true, seeing it published under “Future Perfect” is worrying .
I didn’t read the Future Perfect article as being especially supportive (though I only skimmed the middle portions). It seemed like a fairly neutral report on “something a lot of people on our side of the political spectrum care about”. Did I miss a portion of the article that actually advocated for the idea?
For the record, I think it’s best to ignore Future Perfect articles that don’t have any obvious bearing on EA causes (unless they seem actively damaging to EA) because something like half their work fits that description and I don’t think that’s going to change.
I agree with Aaron, though I might be more in favor than most people of “high-quality EA Forum discussion of things that are important for how the world works but aren’t obviously EA-flavored or actionable”. Vox probably isn’t a great source for topics, but I do think EA should be branching out increasingly into topics that don’t feel EA-ish, to build up models and questions that might feed into interventions further down the road.
+1
I think monetary policy etc. has a lot of relevance to things EA cares about.
Happily it’s already on Open Phil’s radar: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/macroeconomic-policy
If it’s crankery then it shouldn’t get a fairly neutral report.