substack – J. W. Mason

Industrial Policy: Further Thoughts

(Cross-posted from my Substack. If you like this blog, why not subscribe to that too?)

I just returned from Bangalore, where Arjun and I spent an intense 10 days working on our book, and on another project which I’ll be posting about in due time. I’d never been to India before, and it was … a lot. It took me a while to put my finger on the overarching impression: not chaos, or disorder, but incongruity — buildings and activities right on top of each other that, in an American context, you’d expect to be widely separated in space or time. That, and the constant buzz of activity, and crowds of people everywhere. In vibes, if not in specifics, it felt like a city of back-to-back Times Squares. I imagine that someone who grew up there would find an American city, even New York, rather dull.

It’s a city that’s gone from one million people barely a generation ago to 8 million today, and is still growing. There’s a modern subway, clean, reliable and packed, with the open-gangway cars New York is supposed to switch to eventually. It opened 15 years ago and now has over 60 stations — I wish we could build like that here. But the traffic is awesome and terrifying. Every imaginable vehicle — handpainted trucks, overloaded and dangling with tassels and streamers; modern cars; vans carrying sheep and goats; the ubiquitous three-wheeled, open-sided taxis; the even more ubiquitous motorbikes, sometimes carrying whole families; and of course the wandering cows — with no stoplights or other traffic control to speak of, and outside the old central city, no sidewalks either. Crossing the street is an adventure.

I realize that I am very far from the first person to have this reaction to an Indian city. Some years ago Jim Crotty was here for some kind of event, and the institution he was visiting provided him with a driver. Afterwards, he said that despite all the dodging and weaving through the packed roads he never felt anything but safe and comfortable. But, he added, “I would never get into a car with that guy in the United States. He’d be so bored, he’d probably fall asleep.”

Varieties of industrial policy. The panel I moderated on industrial policy is up on YouTube, though due to some video glitch it is missing my introductory comments. Jain Family Institute also produced a transcript of the event, which is here.

It was a very productive and conversation; I thought people really engaged with each other, and everyone had something interesting to contribute. But it left me a bit puzzled: How could people who share broad political principles, and don’t seem to disagree factually about the IRA, nonetheless arrive at such different judgements of it?

I wrote a rather long blog post trying to answer this question.

The conclusion I came to was that the reason Daniela Gabor (and other critics, though I was mostly thinking of Daniela when I wrote it) takes such a negative view of the IRA is that she focuses on the form of interface between the state and production it embodies: subsidies and incentives to private businesses. This approach accepts, indeed reinforces, the premise that the main vehicle for decarbonization is private investment. Which means that making this investment attractive to private business owners, for which profitability is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you don’t think the question “how do we solve this urgent social problem” should be immediately translated into “how do we ensure that business can make money solving the problem,” then the IRA deserves criticism not just on the details but for its fundamental approach.

I am quite sympathetic to this argument. I don’t think anyone on the panel would disagree with it, either normatively as a matter of principle or descriptively as applied to the IRA. And yet the rest of us, to varying degrees, nonetheless take a more positive view of the IRA than Daniela does.

The argument of the post was that this is because we focus more on two other dimensions. First, the IRA’s subsidies are directed to capital expenditure itself, rather than financing; this already distinguishes it from what I had thought of as derisking. And second the IRA’s subsidies are directed toward narrowly specified activities (e.g. battery production) rather than to some generic category of green or sustainable investment, as a carbon tax would be. I called this last dimension “broad versus fine-grained targeting,” which is not the most elegant phrasing. Perhaps I would have done better to call it indicative versus imperative targeting, tho I suppose people might have objected to applying the latter term to a subsidy. In any case, if you think the central problem is the lack of coordination among private investment decisions, rather than private ownership s such, this dimension will look more important.

Extending the matrix. The post got a nice response; it seems like other people have been thinking along similar lines. Adam Tooze restated the argument more gracefully than I did:

Mason’s taxonomy focuses attention on two axes: how far is industrial policy driven by direct state engagement v. how far does it operate at arms-length through incentives? On the other hand, how far is green industrial policy broad-brush offering general financial incentives for green investment, as opposed to more fine-grained focus on key sectors and technologies?

Skeptics like Daniel Gabor, Mason suggests, can be seen as placing the focus on the form of policy action, prioritizing the question of direct versus indirect state action. Insofar as the IRA operates by way of tax incentives it remains within the existing, hands-off paradigm. A big green state would be far more directly involved. Those who see more promise in the IRA would not disagree with this judgment as to form but would insist that what makes the IRA different is that it engages in relatively fine-grained targeting of investment in key sectors.

My only quibble with this is that I don’t think it’s just two dimensions — to me, broad versus narrow and capital expenditure versus financing are two independent aspects of targeting.

I should stress that I wrote the post and the table to clarify the lines of disagreement on the panel, and in some similar discussions that I’ve been part of. They aren’t intended as a general classification of industrial policy, which — if it can be done at all — would require much more detailed knowledge of the range of IP experiences than I possess.

Tooze offers his own additional dimensions:

The relationship of economic policy to the underlying balance of class forces.
The mediation of those forces through the electoral system …
The agenda, expertise & de facto autonomy of state institutions…

These are certainly interesting and important questions. But it seems to me that they are perhaps questions for a historian rather than for a participant. They will offer a very useful framework for explaining, after the fact, why the debate over industrial policy turned out the way that it did. But if one is engaged in politics, one can’t treat the outcome one is aiming at as a fact to be explained. Advocacy in a political context presumes some degree of freedom at whatever decision point it is trying to influence. One wouldn’t want to take this too far: It’s silly to talk about what policies “should” be if there is no one capable of adopting them. But it seems to me that by participating in a political debate within a given community, you are accepting the premise, on some level, that the outcome depends on reason and not the balance of forces.

That said, Tooze’s third point, about state institutions, I think does work in an advocacy context, and adds something important to my schema. Though it’s not entirely obvious which way it cuts. Certainly a lack of state capacity — both administrative and fiscal — was an important motivation for the original derisking approach, and for neoliberalism more broadly. But as Beth Popp Berman reminds us, simple prohibitions and mandates are often easier to administer than incentives. And if the idea is to build up state capacity, rather than taking it as a fact, then that seems like an argument for public ownership.

I’ve thought for years that this was a badly neglected question in progressive economics. We have plenty of arguments for public goods — why the government should ensure that things are provided in different amounts or on different terms than a hypothetical market would. We don’t have so many arguments for why, and which, things should be provided by the public. The same goes for public ownership versus public provisions, with the latter entailing non-market criteria and intrinsic motivation, with the civil service protections that foster it.

The case for public provisioning. One group of people who are thinking about these questions seriously are Paul Williams and his team at the Center for Public Enterprise. (Full disclosure: I sit on CPE’s board.) Paul wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago in response to some underinformed criticisms of public housing, on why public ownership is an important part of the housing picture. Looking at the problem from the point of view of the local government that are actually responsible for housing in the US, the problem looks a bit different than the perspective of national governments that I implicitly adopted in my post.

The first argument he makes for public ownership is that it economizes on what is often in practice the binding constraint on affordable housing, the fixed pot of federal subsidies. A public developer doesn’t need the substantial profit margin a private developer would expect; recovering its costs is enough. Public ownership also allows for, in my terms, more fine-grained targeting. A general program of subsidies or inclusionary zoning (like New York’s 421a tax credits) will be too lax in some cases, leaving affordable units on the table, and too stringent in others, deterring construction. A public developer can assess on a case by case basis the proportion and depth of affordable units that a given project can support. A third argument, not emphasized here but which Paul has made elsewhere, is that developing and operating public housing builds up the expertise within the public sector that is needed for any kind of transformative housing policy.

It’s telling but not surprising to see the but-this-one-goes-to-11 response to Paul’s post that all we need for more housing is land-use deregulation. Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the YIMBY position, and I know Paul is too. But it doesn’t help to oversell it. The problems of “not enough housing” and “not enough affordable housing” do overlap, but they are two distinct problems.

A somewhat different perspective on these questions comes from this report by Josh Wallack at Roosevelt, on universal childcare as industrial policy. Childcare doesn’t have some of the specific problems that industrial policy is often presented as the solution to – it doesn’t require specialized long-lived capital goods, or coordination across multiple industries. But, Wallack argues, it shares the essential element: We don’t think that demand on its own will call forth sufficient capacity, even with subsidies, so government has to intervene directly on the supply side, building up the new capacity itself. I’ve always thought that NYC’s universal pre-K was a great success story (both my kids benefited from it) that should be looked to as a model of how to expand the scope of the public sector. So I’m very glad to see this piece, which draws general lessons from the NYC experience. Wallack himself oversaw implementation of the program, so the report has a lot more detail on the specifics of implementation than you normally get. Very worth reading, if you’re at all interested in this topic.

One area where Wallack thinks the program could have done better is democratic participation in the planning process. This could be another dimension for thinking about industrial policy. A more political practice-oriented version of Tooze’s bullets would be to ask to what extent a particular program broadens or narrows the space for popular movements to shape policy. Of course the extent to which this is feasible, or even desirable, depends on the kind of production we’re talking about. In Catalyst, Matt Huber and Fred Stafford argue, persuasively in my view, that there is a tension between the need for larger-scale electricity transmission implied by the transition away from carbon, and the preference of some environmentalists for a more decentralized, locally-controlled energy system. I am less persuaded by their argument that the need for increased transmission and energy storage rule out a wholesale shift toward renewables; here as elsewhere, it seems to me, which obstacles you regard as insurmountable depend on where you want to end up.

The general point I would make is that politics is not about a final destination, but about a direction of travel. Whether or not we could have 100 percent renewable electricity — or 100 percent public ownership of housing, or whatever — is not so important. What matters is whether we could have substantially more than we have now.

On other topics.

Showing the inconsistencies between conservative free-market economics and actual conservative politics is, in my experience, much harder in practice than it seems like it ought to be, at least if you want to persuade people who actually hold one or both. So it’s fun to see Brian Callaci’s (excellent) arguments against non-compete agreements in ProMarket, the journal of the ur-Chicago Stigler Center.

Garbriel Zucman observes that the past few years have seen very large increases in the share of income at the very top, which now seems to have passed its gilded age peak. Does this mean that I and others have been wrong to stress the gains for low-wage workers from tight post-pandemic labor markets? I don’t think so — both seem to be true. According to Realtime Inequality, the biggest income gains of the past two years have indeed gone to the top 1 percent and especially its top fractiles. But the next biggest gains have gone to the bottom half, which has outpaced the top 10 percent and comfortably outpaced the middle 40 percent. Their income numbers don’t further break out the bottom half, but given that the biggest wage gains have come a the very bottom, I suspect this picture would get even stronger if we looked further down the distribution.

This may well be a general pattern. The incomes that rise fastest in an economic boom are those that come from profits, on the one hand, and flexible wages that are strongly dependent on labor-market conditions on the other. People whose income comes from less commodified labor, with more socially embedded wage-setting, will be relatively insulated from swings in demand, downward but also upward. This may have something to do with the negative feeling about the economy among upper-middle class households that Emily Stewart writes about in Vox.

I’m still hoping to write something more at length about the debates around “greedflation” and price controls. But in the meantime, this from Servaas Storm is very good.

What I’ve been reading. On the plane to Bangalore, I finished Enzo Traverso’s Fire and Blood. I suppose it’s pretty common now to talk about the period from 1914 to 1945 as a unit, a second Thirty Years War. Traverso does this, but with the variation of approaching it as a European civil war — a war within a society along lines of class and ideology, rather than a war between states. A corollary of this, and arguably the animating spirit of the book, is the rehabilitation of anti-fascism as a positive political program. It’s a bit different from the kind of narrative history I usually read; the organization is thematic rather than chronological, and the focus is on culture — there are no tables and hardly any numbers, but plenty of reproductions of paintings. It reads more like a series of linked essays than a coherent whole, but what it lacks in overarching structure in makes up with endless fascinating particulars. I liked it very much.

At Substack: The End of Laissez Faire

(I wrote this post about two weeks ago, but then took a while getting the Substack actually launched. Going forward, hopefully the content will be more timely. All substack content is free; you can subscribe to the newsletter version here. Hopefully the content will be more timely in the future!)

Sometimes I think being a normal economist must be like one of those classic office jobs. You drive to work, park in the garage, take the elevator up to your office. You take some papers from your inbox and put them in your outbox. There’s the research frontier; ok, we’ve advanced it a little bit. Then the bell rings, quitting time. Whereas here in the heterodox world, it’s like you’ve let yourself in through a gap in the fence and you’re wondering, is this place a construction site, or is something being demolished, or is it an archaeological dig? I think this is my desk, but it could be some weird art object, or possibly part of the ventilation system. This person in the hallway — are they the boss, or a customer, or maybe someone in need of emergency medical assistance? Am I sure I have a job? Am I even supposed to be in here?

Well then. Back to work!

The question of the moment is industrial policy. Not so long ago, the consensus on climate policy, at the high table at least, was that carbon pricing was it. Government provides the public interest with an abstract monetary representation, and then private businesses (or “markets”) will translate that representation into whatever concrete changes to production are called for. In recent years, though, the debate seems to have been shifting rather rapidly towards what I have called an investment-focused approach. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (along with other similar measures) seems to mark a decisive turn toward industrial policy, in the US at least. This is not only about climate — the disruptions to global supply chains during the pandemic and, more worryingly, a renewed sense of rivalry with China, have strengthened the case for support for key sectors of the economy.

(Full disclosure: When someone mentioned to me early in the Biden administration that there was interest in dealing with the chip shortage by fostering a US industry, I thought it was a silly idea that would go nowhere. This was, it seemed to me, about the worst case for policy — a problem that was at once both extraordinarily hard for government to solve, and likely to take care of itself on its own before long. Shows you how much I know! — or perhaps, how much things have changed.)

The case for industrial policy, obviously, involves a reevaluation of the capacity of government and the problems it is expected to solve — what Keynes, in an essay whose title can be repurposed today, called the line between agenda and non-agenda. But it also, a bit less obviously, involves a shift in how we think about the economy. An economy where industrial policy makes sense is not one that can be usefully described in terms of a unique, stable equilibrium toward which decentralized decisionmakers will converge. Industrial policy only makes sense in a world where increasing returns and learning by doing create significant path dependence — what we are good at today depends on what we were doing yesterday — and where an uncertain future and the need for large, irreversible investments, and the prevalence of complementarity rather than substitution, creates coordination problems that markets are unable to solve. I don’t know that the drafters of the IRA were conscious of it, but they were implicitly endorsing a very different model of the economy than the one that one finds in textbooks.

Supply constraints. My big recent publication, coauthored as usual with Arjun Jayadev, is an article in the Review of Keynesian Economics called “Rethinking Supply Constraints.” It addresses exactly this issue. The one-sentence summary is that it makes more sense to think of the productive capacity of the economy in terms of a speed limit — a limit on the rate at which output and employment can grow — rather than an absolute ceiling, as in conventional measures of potential output. This, we argue, fits better with a wide range of empirical phenomena. Equally important, it fits better with a vision of the economy as an open-ended collective transformation of the world, as opposed to the allocation of an existing basket of stuff.

There’s a summary in this blogpost, and video of my presentation of it at the University of Massachusetts is here. (I start around 47 minutes in.) I will try to write more about it in this newsletter soon.

Low rates and bubbles. My latest Barron’s piece (I write one more or less monthly) was on whether the post-2007 decade of low interest rates can be blamed for Sam Bankman-Fried and financial bubbles and frauds more generally. As always, when the headline is a question, the answer is no.

I don’t think I quite stuck the landing with this one. The big point I should have hammered on is that if abundant credit ends up supporting projects that are socially and privately worthless, that’s a problem. But it is a problem with the institutions whose job it is to allocate credit, not with low interest rates or abundant credit as such. If banks and bank-like institutions can borrow at lower rates, it’s easy to see why they’d lend to projects with lower returns. It’s harder to see why they’d lend to projects with negative returns. The idea, evidently, is that for some reason when interest rates are too low financial-market participants will make choices that are not only socially costly but costly to themselves as well. The low rates-cause-bubbles arguments almost amount to a kind of financial terrorism — give us the risk-free returns we were counting on, or we’ll blow up our portfolios, and some chunk of the economy along with it.

The connection to industrial policy? If we don’t trust financial markets to make investment decisions, that strengthens the case for a bigger public role.

Biden, Brenner, and Benanav. Robert Brenner’s frequent collaborator Dylan Riley wrote a piece in the NLR blog Sidecar, drawing on Brenner’s work to argue that industrial policy is hopeless because of global overcapacity; you’ve got to seize the commanding heights or stay home. I don’t agree. I think there are ways that the socialist project can be advanced via Biden administration initiatives like the IRA, and wrote a piece for Jacobin explaining why.

Some people liked it — Adam Tooze gave it a nice mention in one of his newsletters. Others did not. Aaron Benanav wrote a long and rather irritated rebuttal in New Left Review. I disagree with a lot of what he wrote, which is fine; he, as he made very clear, disagreed with what I wrote. As the protagonist of James Salter’s great Korean War novel The Hunters says, “You shoot at them, they shoot at you. What could be fairer?” But I am a little annoyed that my jaunty Hamilton reference, intended to warn against the danger of imagining that you are in a position of power, got turned into evidence that I myself dream of being in the “room where it happens.” That seems unsporting.

I talked about my piece and the larger debate with Doug Henwood on his excellent Behind the News podcast. I will also be writing a piece for NLR that will be in part a response to Benanav but mostly, I hope, an intervention to move the debate in a more positive direction.

Speaking of Korea. I was on an English-language Korean news show recently, talking about the IRA. The video is here; a twitter thread summarized the points I was trying to make is here. An implicit background point, also very relevant to my objections to the Brenner-Riley-Benanav position, is that trade flows respond mostly to income, not relative prices. How much the US imports from Korea is to a first approximation a function of US GDP growth; subsidies (and exchange rates) are distinctly secondary.

What I am reading. I just finished the novel Variations on Night and Day, by Abdelrahman Munif. It’s the third novel in the Cities of Salt trilogy, though the first chronologically. The first novel, also called Cities of Salt, is about people in a fictional Middle Eastern Country (more or less Saudi Arabia) in the early days of the oil boom. It’s an extraordinary book in many ways, including its use of mostly collective protagonists — large parts of the narration are from the point of view of “the villagers”, “the workers” and so on. The second book, The Trench, moves up the social scale, focusing on the various schemers, strivers, climbers and entrepreneurs – business and political – who accrete around the monarchy’s capital. It’s got an ensemble, rather than collective cast, with one central character and an endless number of minor ones – it would make a great tv show. (Think a gulf-monarchy version of Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.) The third book — Variations on Night and Day — moves up the social scale again, and back in time, to the earlier life of the sultan whose death occurs at the very beginning of The Trench. It’s a great book, gripping as narrative and morally serious. It provides what science fiction and fantasy promise but very seldom deliver, an immersive experience of a world very different from our own. Still I have to say, I somewhat preferred the first two books. At the end of the day, sultans are just not that interesting.

ETA: As it happens, I went to graduate school with Munif’s son Yasser. He was in the sociology department while I was in economics and we used to hang out quite a bit, tho I haven’t seen him in some years.

At Substack: Hello World

I barley keep up this blog any more; do I really need a new format for (not) writing online? The problem, from my point of view, is that, these days, the only way people see blogs (or most other things one writes) is via twitter. And relying on twitter does not, at this point, see like a great idea. I’m moderately hopeful that an email newsletter can offer an alternative way.

In any case, my new substack is here. It’s pretty no-frills at the moment. I’ve pasted the first post below. For the moment I plan on cross-posting everything, but depending on how the substack goes I may revisit that.

What is this? This is an email newsletter, delivered through Substack. You probably get some others like it already. This one is from me, Joshua William Mason, or J. W. Mason as I usually write it. It’s called Money and Things. This specific email or post is the first one.

Why am I getting this? Either you signed up for it, or I added you. I subscribed a few people who I thought might be interested in hearing from me now and then. I hope you don’t mind! If you do, there’s an unsubscribe button somewhere. I promise I won’t add you again.

What’s the point of it? My main goal with this is to share things I’ve said or written in other settings, along with some interesting things I have read. I write a fair amount in a fair number of venues, and am in the news now and then. So it seems worth having one place to share it all with people who might like to see it. And then, despite the firehouse of content constantly aimed at each of our heads, it still can be nice to have someone point out something worth reading that you might not have run across otherwise.

The other goal is to have a structure for comments on things that are happening in the world. There are always things going on that I don’t have the time or energy or confidence to write about at length, but might have something interesting to say about in a more informal setting. Will a substack be any better for this than the blog I’ve been keeping for the past dozen years? I don’t know, but it seems worth a try.

So, a lot like a twitter feed, then? Yes, very much. I want to use the newsletter to share material that right now I use twitter for. Not everyone is on twitter, after all. And while I can’t see myself getting off twitter entirely – there are still too many interesting people there – I would like to spend less time on it, for all the familiar reasons.

How often will you be sending these? I’m vaguely hoping for once a week. I’m sure it won’t be more often than that; it could be much less. I will at least try to send one out whenever I publish something.

Why is the newsletter called Money and Things? Well, that captures the range of my interests. I write a lot about money, finance, central banks, credit and debt, inflation and other money-related and money-adjacent topics. But I also write about other things.

Also, Money and Things is the working title of the book that Arjun Jayadev and I are working on. This book has been in progress for longer than I care to think about, but it’s now mostly written and should be coming out from the University of Chicago Press sometime in the next year. So I also want to use this email to share material from the book, and, down the road, to encourage people to read it.

What is the book about? Oof, I hoped you wouldn’t ask that. Well, it’s about money … and things.

Can you be more specific? The book is an effort to pull together some different strands of thinking around money that Arjun and I have been grappling with since we were students at the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. One place to start is the tendency — both in economics and everyday common sense — to think of money either as just one useful object among others, or as a faithful reflection of a material world outside itself. Whereas to us it seems clear we should think of it as constituting its own self-contained world, a game or a logic, that in some ways responds to external material and social reality, but also evolves autonomously, and reshapes that external world in its turn. Economists like to think that when we measure things in terms of money, that is capturing some pre-existing “real” value or quantity. (Like, when you see a figure like GDP, you assume in some sense it reflects a quantity of stuff that was produced.) But in fact — our argument goes — while money is a yardstick that allows all sorts of things to be numerically compared, it doesn’t reflect any underlying quantity except money itself.

Keynesians have been criticizing the idea that money is neutral, just a veil, for decades. But we think there’s still space to spell out what the positive alternative looks like, and why it matters. You might say it’s an attempt to elevate the argument of our “Fisher dynamics” papers — where we argued that movements in debt-income ratios have more to do with interest rates and inflation than change in borrowing behavior — into a worldview or paradigm.

What we’re mainly interested in is the interface or boundary between money-world and the concrete world outside of it. (One jokey summary is that we’re starting from Keynes’ General Theory of Money, Interest and Employment, and writing about the “and”.) The idea is that by focusing there, we can connect some long-standing theoretical questions around the nature of money with contemporary debates about policy and politics, and with historical developments like the shareholder revolution or the euro crisis. We’re aiming for a spot in intellectual space somewhere between Jim Crotty, Perry Mehrling, Doug Henwood and David Graeber, if that makes sense.

Will you have a better answer to this question by the time the book comes out? I hope so!

Getting back to the newsletter — will there be free and paid versions? No, there will not. If someone wanted to give me money for it, I wouldn’t say no. If I got a little, I’d buy my kids ice cream. If I got a significant amount, which seems unlikely, then I might put more time into writing it. If I get none at all, that’s perfectly fine.

My personal view – which I know not everyone shares – is that if you are a tenure-track academic, it’s a bit unethical to charge money for a newsletter or similar product. The job of an academic is not just teaching; we are being paid to think about the world and share what we learn. So to me – again, I know many people feel differently – when you turn your work as a scholar into a kind of private business venture, that’s almost a form of embezzlement. Perhaps you saw Inside Job, that movie about economists and the financial crisis. Remember how eagerly someone like Frederic Mishkin turned his stature as a big-name monetary economist into big checks for himself? I don’t want to be that guy. Of course I’m not under any illusion that my integrity carries anything like the market price of a Mishkin’s. But it’s still worth something to me.

To be clear, this doesn’t apply to people who make a living as journalists or writers. If you are a professional writer your readers need to be paying you one way or another, and subscriber-only newsletter content is a legitimate way to make that happen. But as an academic, I’m already being compensated for this kind of work.

Does this mean your book will also be distributed for free? Well, no. The publishers will charge whatever they normally do for a book like this, and Arjun and I will get whatever (presumably small) royalties we’re entitled to out of that.

So how is that different? I don’t know. I feel like it’s different? Of course producing a physical book is costly, and the publisher has their own employees, whose services are valuable, and other costs that have to be paid. On the other hand, it would be technically feasible to just put the book up online as a pdf, and let anyone download it. So making people pay is in some sense a choice we are making. Still, if Inside Job had merely caught Mishkin admitting he’d published a book about financial crises, I don’t think that would have been much of a gotcha. Although then again, on the other hand, the textbook-writing business does seem a bit morally compromised. (Personally I try not to assign anything I can’t distribute a free pdf of.) I do hope our book will be used in the classroom. But I wish students could get excerpts of it in xeroxed course packets, they way I did when I was in college.

Anyway. Money and Things, the newsletter, will always be entirely free. Money and Things, the book, will not be.

You seem to have strong feelings on this topic. Do you have anything else to say about it? Yes, I do. I’ve always found it infuriating that so much scholarly work is hidden behind paywalls. It goes against the whole idea of scholarship, especially if you think of your academic work as part of some political project or as otherwise useful. During the six-seven years between my two stints in graduate school, I was intermittently engaged in online economics discussions, and I found it deeply frustrating that there were so many interesting articles that, without an academic affiliation, I was not permitted to read. I hope someday we recognize IP as applied to academic work for what it is, a comprehensive regime of censorship. (And Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of sci-hub, as one of humanity’s heroes.)

A bit more recently, but still some years ago, I joined the steering committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics in large part to see if I could convince them to convert URPE’s journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics, to open access. Here you are, I thought, doing work that’s supposed to be part of a larger transformative project, that is relevant not just for other academics but for workers and activists. So why are you enlisting the power of the state to stop people from reading it?

As is often the case, what seemed unanswerable in principle turned out to be less straightforward in practice. The leadership of URPE the organization is largely separate from that of the journal; there’s a multi-year contract with the publisher; and even if open access were allowed, URPE’s share of the subscription revenue is basically the organization’s entire budget. If we went open-access, how would we pay the editor, or award fellowships to students in heterodox programs, or fly people out for the steering committee meetings? Maybe, I suggested, allowing people to read the journal is more important than flying people to meetings. Easy for you to say, someone replied, you live in New York; for others, if they can’t come out and meet in person, they won’t be part of this community at all. Besides, are there really so many non-academics who want to read RRPE?

Maybe if I’d pushed harder I could have got somewhere. But the obstacles were real, and no one seemed to agree with me, so I gave up, and eventually left the steering committee. (Life is too short to be on too many committees.) But I still think I was right.

Anything else? No, I think that’s it for now. But don’t worry – there will be another post coming shortly after this one.