The previous post got quite a bit of attention — more, I think, than anything I’ve written on this blog in the dozen years I’ve been doing it.
I would like to do a followup post replying to some of the comments and criticisms, but I haven’t had time and realistically may not any time soon, or ever. In the meantime, though, here is some existing content that might be relevant to people who would like to see the arguments in that post drawn out more fully.
Here is a podcast interview I did with some folks from Current Affairs a month or so ago. The ostensible topic is Modern Mone(tar)y Theory, but the conversation gave me space to talk more broadly about how to think about macroeconomic questions.
A pair of Roosevelt reports (cowritten with Andrew Bossie) on economic policy during World War II are an effort to find relevant lessons for the present moment: The Public Role in Economic Transformation: Lessons from World War II, Public Spending as an Engine of Growth and Equality: Lessons from World War II
Here is a piece I wrote a couple years ago on Macroeconomic Lessons from the Past Decade. Bidenomics could be seen as a sort of deferred learning of the lessons from the Great Recession. So even though this was written before the pandemic and the election, there’s a lot of overlap here.
This report from Roosevelt, What Recovery? is an earlier stab at learning those lessons. I hope to be revisiting a lot of the topics here (and doing a better job with them, hopefully) in a new Roosevelt report that should be out in a couple of months.
If you like podcast interviews, here’s one I did with David Beckworth of Macro Musings following the What Recovery report, where we talked quite a bit about hysteresis and the limits of monetary policy, among other topics.
And here are some relevant previous past posts on this blog:
In The American Prospect: The Collapse of Austerity Economics
A Baker’s Dozen of Reasons Not to Worry about Government Debt
Good News on the Economy, Bad News on Economic Policy
A Demystifying Decade for Economics