How big a bubble ?

John Quiggin14 Comments

We[1] are often urged to “get out of our bubbles” and engage with a wider range of viewpoints. This mostly turns out to be a waste of time. As I experienced from my side, engagement with the political right consists mainly of responding to a string of talking points and whataboutery, with little if any content. On the rare occasions these discussions have been useful, it’s typically because the other party in the discussion is on the verge of breaking with the right[2]

To restate the case in favour of getting out of the bubble, it’s easy to see examples of people on the left putting forward arguments that don’t stand up under criticism, but haven’t faced such criticism within the limited circles in which they’ve been discussed. But the most effective criticisms of such arguments is likely to come from people with broadly similar political aims and understandings.

As Daniel Davies once observed, opinion at Crooked Timber, the group blog of which I am a member, runs the gamut from social democrat to democratic socialist, and I have traversed that range in both directions. I get plenty of benefit from arguing with other people in that range and with some a little outside it, such as liberaltarians and (not too dogmatic) Marxists.

Opening up the discussion bubble now.

fn1. At least we on the left, I rarely run across this suggestion in the rightwing media I read.
fn2. TBC, I don’t think the powerful force of my arguments has converted them; rather it’s that people making this kind of shift often have interesting things to say,

The Scrooge McDuck theory of the rich

John Quiggin13 Comments

Readers of a certain age will remember Scrooge McDuck, the mega-rich uncle of Donald, who enjoys diving into his gigantic money bin filled with gold coins. Replace gold with paper currency[1] and you have the archetypal version of a theory of the rich[2] popular in some versions of Modern Monetary Theory.

Scrooge McMMT has a fancy house and a large bin to hold his money, but otherwise doesn’t spend that much on personal consumption or on physical investment. If the government increases his taxes, the level of money in the bin is lowered, but Scrooge’s expenditure on goods and services doesn’t change at all. Instead, he dips into the money bin a little further to buy politicians who will do his bidding, including (but not limited to) reversing the tax tax cuts increases.

Conversely, if the government prints money to buy goods and services from the (unspecified) businesses that provide Scrooge’s wealth, the money raises the level of the bin, and nothing else changes.

If this story is right, then there’s no need to tax Scrooge in order to divert resources from private to public use. The government can just create the money and let it pile up in Scrooge’s bin.

Entirely separately from economic effects, there’s Scrooge’s unfortunate habit of buying political influence for malign ends. If his wealth were all taxed away, that would stop.

This leads to a kind of motte and bailey argument. The full political program implied (the bailey) here is a combination of increased public spending and high taxes on the rich to reduce their influence. But since the two are logically separate, if the political resistance to taxation is too strong, we can retreat to the motte, and just spend the money, without running into any resource constraints.

When I get a round tuit, I’ll give some arguments as to why this model isn’t a good one. But (apart from the snarky cartoon reference), I think it’s a pretty fair characterization of the version of MMT presented in (for example), Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth

fn1. Paper would be more consistent with physical reality, since swimming in gold is a very bad idea.

fn2. An ambiguous term. The image conveyed, and the common use of examples like Bezos and Gates, suggests we are only talking about billionaires, but much of the actual debate concerns higher taxes on annual incomes starting at $250k or $400k.

Australia’s COVID plan was designed before we knew how Delta would hit us …

John Quiggin15 Comments

… We need more flexibility. That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/australias-covid-plan-was-designed-before-we-knew-how-delta-would-hit-us-we-need-more-flexibility-168189 (with Richard Holden and Steven Hamilton)

Conclusion

In these rapidly changing times it makes no sense to fix a policy plan based on a months-old model.

We need to respond flexibly to new evidence as it comes to hand. We need to consider all kinds of data, including new evidence on the transmissibility of the virus, estimates of the likely uptake of vaccines, and observations on the way restrictions reduce movement around our cities.

What we don’t need is more speculation about the hypothetical dates and vaccination rates at which various restrictions will be lifted (or perhaps, looking at overseas experience, reimposed). Let’s focus on the facts as they are now.