A better world—a better twitter—is indeed possible...

Suresh Naidu: I will stake my fancy economics job on this: Nothing in @Ocasio2018's policy program is inconsistent with a 2018 understanding of economics.

Wojtek Kopczuk: I missed it before, by my favorite colleague to disagree with. Congratulations on tenure @snaidunl!

Suresh Naidu: Sigh you drew me out. Tell me which policy is infeasible and not addressing some market failure?

Wojtek Kopczuk: They are inconsistent with the government budget constraint. And her MMT support is definitely inconsistent with mainstream economics.

Suresh Naidu: MMT is totally consistent with lots of mainstream macro when the economy is demand constrained (and fiscal theory of the price level when its not). it is unfortunate its adherents dont see that. And budget constraints are endogenous.

Ivan Werning: What do you have in mind?

Suresh Naidu: Oh crap a real macroeconomist. I think stripped of mysticism, MMT is really boils down to "fiscal mutipliers greater than 1", which could be true in demand constrained economy.

Ivan Werning: Let's not call that MMT.

Arindrajit Dube: Core propositions of MMT seem hard to differentiate from old school (“paleo” Keynesianism) in most likely states is the world ... maybe a difference is whether literally any level of public debt can be sustained at a non-accelerating inflation. Paleo Keynesians may say no.

Brad DeLong: MMT is Abba Lerner's Functional Finance with bells & whistles & some confusions. Manipulate G to stabilize Y & π, manipulate M to get an i to make debt finance sustainable, and rely on π to tell you if your policies are sustainable... If π↑ need G↓

Suresh Naidu: Clearest exposition of MMT in a tweet. Fight me deficit owls!

Ivan Werning: Interesting. I thought idea was broadly to use a feedback rule and push back against fixed doctrines.

Brad DeLong: Yes, but in some ways MMT or FF is the fiscal theory of the price level: if your government debt strategy moves in a long-term unsustainable direction, the FTotPL raises prices now. Hence successful stabilization of Y & π now guarantees no LR debt sustainability problem. Relies a little too heavily on the efficient markets hypothesis in the form of the FTotPL for my taste...

Ivan Werning: Seems wishful. Basically, I can't imagine how it plays out in any of the debt crises scenarios (which is where we should test it!) I know of, but maybe that is very "local" in my thinking.

Brad DeLong: Continuous-time fiscal theory of the price level kinda the wrong model for debt crises. Lots of Gennaioli-Shleifer "Oh f---! Why was I thinking that yesterday? We need to dump our entire portfolio now" phenomena which CT RE & FTotPL do not handle well...

Ivan Werning: Is there any relatively modern rendition of these Lerner ideas you recommend? Dynamics, stable steady states, and all?

Brad DeLong Haven't seen one. In one sense, it is too easy: in the fiscal theory of the price level, every G, T, M, & thus D path that stabilizes π satisfies LR government budget constraint. Add an exp Phillips Curve & Y, u are fine too. 3 instruments, 1 target, 2 policy degrees of freedom

Ivan Werning: People who think these things, have they ever visited latin america, say?

Brad DeLong: big distinction in fiscal running room between reserve currencies with exorbitant privilege, and all others. If MMT or MMT-light applies, applies only to 1st...

Wojtek Kopczuk: The reserve currency status is not given for all eternity

Brad DeLong: touché... if we reelect Trump here, we may find we have some identifying variance on this question...

Arindrajit Dube It’s probably not accidental that US w/ reserve currency exhorbitant privilege is where MMT arose: it’s the easiest to imagine it in this setting. One has to move substantially away from current equilibrium before it seems totally absurd.

Brad DeLong: But MMT does perform the valuable function of reminding people that, for the US (and Germany, and Britain, and Japan), r_{short-safe} < g, in which case government debt as safe asset provision is not a drag on but rather a financing mechanism for substantive government programs.

Brad DeLong: Sunday morning twitter threads like this remind me that we could live in the Republic of Plato rather than the Sewer of Romulus as far as social science and public policy are concerned, and that the internet can be an intellectual force multiplier rather than a hive of scum and villainy... A better world is possible! Toilers of all lands, unite! The full product of labor to the workers by hand and brain, with appropriate deductions for the social welfare function Lagrange multiplier for the temporary scarcity of produced means of production!!

"Civility" looks very different depending on where you stand...

From here http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/ I have excerpted three short paragraphs very much worth reading and thinking about:

Andrew Sullivan: "This bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims.... there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background.... The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it..."

Ta Nehisi Coates: "I got incredibly used to learning from people... quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn’t really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.... You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn’t speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn’t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us.... I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him..."

Henry Farrell: "In juxtaposition, Sullivan’s and Coates’s pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a 'different time' when 'neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth', is, in Coates’ understanding, a time where he was required to 'take seriously' the argument that 'black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people' as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The 'civility' and 'generosity of spirit' that supported 'human to human' conversation is juxtaposed to Coates’s 'teachers' who didn’t see him 'completely as a human being'. What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan’s depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed. Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan’s claim that 'identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable', and we are all being pulled down by the 'riptide of tribalism'..."

Finished? Good. Perhaps I should simply say that Henry Farrell has written everything that needs to be written here.

Or perhaps I should note that, back in The Day, it was not us, their adversaries on, say, the 2001 tax cut, who were denying George W. Bush's and Andrew Sullivan's good faith in the debate. It was Andrew Sullivan himself glorying that neither George W. Bush nor he was arguing in good faith:

The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism' shows how uphill the struggle is.... A certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again...

Sullivan felt himself under no obligation to be honest or civil back when he thought he was riding high. Rather the reverse. And it was not just Black people—although it was far stronger there. Those of us who thought that, like, arithmetic in the public sphere should be accurate were also not worth engaging in good faith.

Let me venture to generalize: Andrew Sullivan was always an interesting thinker, in that "civility" was something that others needed to extend to him but not that he was under any obligation to extend to anybody else. Most of all, we remember Andrew Sullivan after 911:

The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column...

and:

We might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself-a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead...

It was not just Ta-Nehisi Coates but everybody who had doubts about the rush to conquer Iraq who had good reason to think they were regarded by Sullivan as something less than partners in argument and discernment.