Please, talk in marginals and not categoricals!

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I'm not sure they're zealots. You insisting so doesn't make it so.

MMT or monetarism is considered fringe but it is still considered "post Keynesianism."

Your pure Keynesianism is raise govt spending & cut taxes in bad times, reduce spending and raise taxes in good times.

That got modified into "as long as debt to GDP trends down or stays stable you are ok" so you can still borrow in good times, just less.

Everyone is de facto Keynesian in our policy, and macro econ text books are Keynesian. MMT is not all that different but I would not call it mainstream.

Both GOP and Dems run deficits regularly. The GOP does tax cuts while Dems do spending.

You are going to have to explain your arguments for why its "pseudoscience" rather than slinging insults around. The great experiment in proving Keynesianism correct was 2008-9 recession. Europe mainly cut spending (austerity) while the US continued spending via borrowing. Our economy recovered quicker. That was the real world experiment.

Right wing economists were claiming there would be hyperinflation. There was not and this is when the people writing about the "zero lower bound" for interest rates won out definitively. When interest rates are near 0, the government should borrow like crazy.

So just repeating right wing talking points? Got it. US has the among the lowest taxes of the rich countries. Getting rid of the IRS is insane talk. The people who benefit from that the most are the rich, and they are not on your side. They want to take the money and run. The IRS can't even go after rich tax cheats because the rich tax cheats have better lawyers.

This is full of categorial talking by the way, plus a smattering of weird anecdotal stories I am not sure really matter. I have never seen a kids' lemonade stand shut down. And if it were shut down, it would be due to my HOA rules not Washington DC.

You can go to a website and see US rankings for business friendly environment -

The US is up there. In Hong Kong you can't even vote or protest.

None of the details matter here, as none of this was even part of my original point.

Well actually my family would really benefit from the income taxes being abolished since our income is in the top 1 to 5 percent of the country and we pay about 30 percent of household income to the feds.Sorry I was confused because I thought you were asking for regs we didnt like.My bad.Best wishes.

Last edited by Texasmoneyman300 on 25 Feb 2023, 2:16 am, edited 2 times in total.

I appreciate the maker of this post having put a label on these statements as being Marginal and Catergorial. I've noticed these statements, but never did research to know how to identify them.

Personally, I find it more productive when someone is willing to reason and listen to reason. I often find that it is categorical statements are used to interrupt someone while they are trying to share, explain or reason on facts.

Thinking about it, it sounds to me like categorical statements sound more like dogmatic emotionally charged statements and marginals sound like reasonable, logical facts or observations from a non biased viewpoint.

I hope that all came out right.

Let me know your opinion.

Thanks, Andre

Also believe it or not it is against state law in most of the 50 US states for a kid to open up a summer lemonade stand without a permit.Its not just a HOA issue.There are laws on the books in many states banning the practice.

OMG obviously I should vote DeSantis/Trump! /s

I saw a kid selling lemonade a few months ago. No shut down. I did it as a kid once. No one shut it down.

Jaywalking is against the law in a lot of places.

Cherry picking weird regulations is easy to do. I can't prove you wrong or right because I am not an expert in regulations.

I don't know what your point is - so I am going to ignore it.

Thank you! People talk in categoricals because people like to sound confident.

It gets more obvious when you go to a typical sports bar and ask, "is team X going to win?"

Typical sports fan: "OH YEAAAAH ITS NOT GOING TO EVEN BE CLOSE!! !"

People love to sound confident.

Go to a sports betting place, and they will tell you a marginal statement:

"Dallas by 3 is the line." Thats a marginal statement. Some betting places also report in odds, like 10 to 1.

10 to 1 odds are pretty good, but if the game is played enough, they will still lose some and that won't make the odds wrong.

That bias works in everday statistics. If I tell you something is a 30% chance of happening, and it happens, people then go, "oh man that guy was wrong!" No, just because an unlikely event happened it does not make the odds wrong.

It's called the "vivid story" bias. If I tell you the murder rate is half what it was in the 1970s, you might go, "thats not true, I just read this story about this guy being shot near me!" What has happened since the 1970s is people's awareness of crime has gone up thanks to better reporting.

Top 5% is 320k and up. And by "family" do you mean your parents? Because talking to you, you sound like me when I was younger. My dad constantly said he was top 1% and that taxes were killing him.

Top 1% is 800k+. So you just gave a big range there which makes me think you didn't look it up, you just want to "feel" like you are top 5%.

When I got older I actually looked it up and my dad wasn't even top 20%. Right wing media does this lie where they convince working class people where they are top 1% so therefore tax cuts to the rich are aimed at them.

I saw this in my older brother when he got a career. He would constantly brag about how much money he made and how he hated taxes. When I told him he was not even top 10%, he flipped out at me. I asked him "if you are top 1%, why the F are there literally thousands of houses in the area just like yours?" The worst part is I make more than he does I just don't talk about it. Also I am aware that I am probably top 15%, depending on how you want to count the # of kids against me.

Also, I can more or less guarantee you that if you were top 1-5%, that its because of some market protection.

A common high salary profession in the US is a medical doctor- and holy geez if you are a medical doctor you cannot claim to be free market at all. The medical field is high paid in the US because of all the protections from competition they enjoy.

When you get to the top 1%, they start to put most of their money in investments and capital gains are taxed way less than labor.

If Americans knew how capital gains taxes worked, they'd revolt. You can make 100k in capital gains per year and pay $0 in taxes! 100k in salary is taxed way higher than that.

Personal experience matters, and it seems to me like you have an advantaged childhood so you are incorrectly assuming that making it is easy. Its common! But just oh so boring.

Tell us what YOU do to make that money. If its your parents, get back to us after YOU made the money.

Carbon emissions are a classic example of an externality, which are something the market clearly cannot handle. Do you not acknowledge the existence of externalities???

Or are you a climate change denier? In that case, consider some other kind of pollution -- of air, water, or land -- that you do believe in the existence of. That too is an externality. There is simply no way that the market is adequate to prevent or limit it.

I think we need a better procedure for developing regulations, to ensure that they are effective without being draconian. But carbon emissions and other kinds of pollution are clearly an example of one of the kinds of things where regulations, of some kind, are needed.


No it does not.

For example, why do Americans tend to be so much fatter than Europeans? Because Europeans eat healthier food, thanks to stricter government regulations about how food can be grown, what kinds of additives can be added, etc..

Here in the U.S.A., it is simply not possible to avoid the unhealthy ingredients in nearly ALL of our food, unless a person has lots of money to spend on specialty health food, and, even then, there is no way for the average purchaser to know exactly what is in the food or exactly how it was grown/created/whatever.


I propose harnessing the lobbyists in a constructive way to help draft regulations. Legislatures could appoint committees of people who represent organizations representing opposing categories of stakeholders. For example, in the case of carbon emissions by a given industry, the committee could include representatives of one or more industry associations, plus some climate scientists, plus representatives of some environmentalist groups. (The industry association representatives should be required to include people who represent the interests of small producers and medium-sized producers, not just people who represent the interests of the larger producers.) The committee members would then be required to negotiate with each other directly to come up with mutually acceptable draft regulations.

EDIT: One of the problems with regulations, at least here in the U.S.A., is that some of them are created by people who have no idea what they are talking about it. An example, from my own experience, is the way that medical devices are regulated by the FDA. (I've done programming work for a medical lab that does remote heart monitoring.) My proposal above could, I hope, help to address this issue.

Ok, so I did my research regarding the chronology and influence of each school of thought and I found this: The current schools of thought in macroeconomics are the New Classical economics and New Keynesian economics. The former comes from the Chicago School (fellow libertarians) and came originally as a refutation of Keynesianism. New Keynesian economics seems to be mainly Monetarism (also chicago school libertarians) according to many experts, one of them Mr.J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.14.1.83

It's a nice comprehensive read.

So, to sum it up, the Chicago school has completely dominated the mainstream. Also, Monetarism is not Keynesian as it preceded Keynesianism in the work of Irving Fisher.

No one talks in either of those terms.

Could you imagine how nerdy every basic conversation would be if people had to state phrases like "marginally speaking.." or "categorically, blah blah blah."

People aren't going to talk in either of those manners. They're just going to talk. ONLY economists will make the differentiations. Go to some kind of economists convention if you want to hear people talk like that.

Or, you know, people who can't tell the difference between the two can not insert themselves into discussions of economics, given that they can't make worthwhile contributions.

That's a categorical statement.

Even being categorical is not as bad as being dogmatic!

I think you misinterpreted. I was referring to MMT is MODERN monetary theory. The wildest is that basically the only thing that matters is inflation and unemployment. In other words, borrow as much as you want as long as unemployment is high and/or inflation is low.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

Thats what I was talking about.

No, the "chicago school" does not dominate. In fact, modern MACROeconomics (I have to make the distinction because there is a whole other side - microeconomics that never makes it to the news) tends to borrow from whatever works.

It was called the "bluewater vs saltwater" debate and see the wiki below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_and_freshwater_economics

We are all Keynesians in the extent that prior to Keynes, the thinking was governments always had to balance their budgets. There isn't a single reputable economist that says that anymore, so that part of Keynesianism and neo Keynesianism has "won out."

Brad DeLong has more in common with Keynesianism. He is at UC Berkeley, part of the "saltwater" side of things. Again, the debate doesn't really matter as much anymore. But no, Keynesianism "won out" by and large.

Monetarism, the type you are talking about, lost a lot of steam in 2008-2009. It didn't account for the zero lower bound of interest rates. MMT, i.e. modern monetarism, kindof explains that better.

But there really aren't any dogmas anymore.

The only thing that the field generally agrees on is that "Austrian" economics is for tin foil hat people.

I read Brad DeLong's blog for years before he went to a subscription method. He is firmly in Paul Krugman's camp for most things, and Krugman is a new Keynesian type. But again, labels don't matter as much any more.

Here is the Keynesian test: do you think the government should balance its budget? If the answer no, then you are a Keynesian. The fact that the field by and large says "no," means Keynesian won out. Chicago schools critiques got incorporated into "new Keynesian" economics, which is more or less where the field is at.

Its not as dogmatic as people think.

By the way, I am/was a microeconomist. I am more into game theory and individual actors as opposed to the economy as a whole.