If we’re going to talk about shoddy reporting at the NY Times, it would be nice if some mention was made of that Stephanie Kelton puff piece from yesterday. I’m going to put on my grumpy liberal economist hat now and point out that economists from the most libertarian Austrians all the way over to left-wing heterodox post-Keynesians unanimously think that MMT is a series of memes masquerading as a theory. And yet MMT has bewitched a substantial section of progressive media elites. This feels like the height of hypocrisy to me. The Left likes to claim that we should “trust the science,” but as soon as the scientists say something they don’t like, science suddenly isn’t so trustworthy anymore. Or to put it another way, the only difference between Stephanie Kelton and the quack anti-vaxxer Robert Malone is that Malone isn’t saying something that a certain brand of progressive desperately wants to hear. False balance is a problem at the Times, but so is self-righteousness mixed with willful ignorance.
If we’re going to talk about shoddy reporting at the NY Times, it would be nice if some mention was made of that Stephanie Kelton puff piece from yesterday. I’m going to put on my grumpy liberal economist hat now and point out that economists from the most libertarian Austrians all the way over to left-wing heterodox post-Keynesians unanimously think that MMT is a series of memes masquerading as a theory. And yet MMT has bewitched a substantial section of progressive media elites. This feels like the height of hypocrisy to me. The Left likes to claim that we should “trust the science,” but as soon as the scientists say something they don’t like, science suddenly isn’t so trustworthy anymore. Or to put it another way, the only difference between Stephanie Kelton and the quack anti-vaxxer Robert Malone is that Malone isn’t saying something that a certain brand of progressive desperately wants to hear. False balance is a problem at the Times, but so is self-righteousness mixed with willful ignorance.