Commentary on monetary policy in the spirit of R. G. Hawtrey
In light of Justice Alito’s opinion today in the consolidated cases Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, relying on the 2018 Trump v. Hawaii case, I am updating this post originally posted exactly eight years ago decrying that abominable decision and opinion which Justice Alito’s opinion can be added as a worthy addition to […]
Here is a slightly edited text of the conversation I had this afternoon on Gemini that began with a question about comparing how Hayek and Dworkin understand the legal meaning of discretion. 3:54 PM Gemini: F.A. Hayek and Ronald Dworkin both express deep skepticism toward the idea of broad, arbitrary judicial discretion, but they approach the […]
Yesterday on Twitter, I commented on a Tweet referencing a comment by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the meeting yesterday between Presidents Trump and Zelensky along with the other European leaders accompanying Zelensky. As I often do, I clicked Grok to check Grok’s understanding of my comment. Past experience hasn’t led me to […]
J. R. Hicks, who introduced the concept of intertemporal equilibrium to English-speaking economists in Value and Capital, was an admirer of Carl Menger, one of the three original Marginal Revolutionaries, crediting Menger in particular for having created an economic theory in time (see his “Time in Economics” in Collected Essays on Economic Theory, vol. II). […]
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level has been percolating among monetary theorists for over three decades: Eric Leeper being the first to offer a formalization of the idea, with Chris Sims and Michael Woodford soon contributed to its further development. But the underlying idea that the taxation power of the state is essential for […]
The published version of the article is now available on the Economic Afairs website https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14680270/2024/44/2. Here’s the abstract: This article considers the contributions of Ralph Hawtrey to monetary theory and macroeconomics, focusing on his monetary business cycle theory and his monetary explanation of the Great Depression. Unlike Milton Friedman’s US-centred…
Last fall and early winter I posted a series of four blogposts (here, here, here, and here) about or related to Ralph Hawtrey as I was trying to gather my thoughts about an essay I wanted to write about Hawtrey as a largely forgotten pioneer of macroeconomics who has received the attention of two recent […]
Nobel Laureate T. C. Koopmans wrote one of the most famous economics articles of the twentieth century, “Measurement Without Theory,” a devastating review of an important, and in many ways useful and meritorious, study of business cycles by two of the fathers of empirical business-cycles research, Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business […]
Clara Mattei, associate professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, recently published a book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, (University of Chicago Press) in which she argues that the fiscal and monetary austerity imposed on Great Britain after World War I to restore the […]
In my previous post, I explained how the real-bills doctrine originally espoused by Adam Smith was later misunderstood and misapplied as a policy guide for central banking, not, as Smith understood it, as a guide for individual fractional-reserve banks. In his recent book on the history of the Federal Reserve, Robert Hetzel recounts how the […]