Author: Asymptosis

Ralph Musgrave, who knows a thing or two about modern economic thinking, perfectly articulates the giant logical hole in monetarist thinking in a recent comment (emphasis mine): If the private sector’s stock of saving is what it wants at current rates of interest, then additional public spending will push savings above the latter desired level, which…

In recent posts on the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts, I’ve highlighted that we have two market estimates of what America’s “capital” is worth — the cumulative sum of net investment (roughly, “book value”), and total household wealth (“market value”). I got curious: how to they compare over the decades? What’s America’s market-to-book ratio, or Tobin’s Q?…

A quick note in response to recent twitter thread, and to a widespread usage that I find to be deeply problematic. You constantly hear very smart thinkers about money saying that money is debt. I strongly disagree. It’s not a useful way to think about money. Quite the contrary. Balance-sheet assets designating the value of claims may…

Noah Smith asks what seems to be an interesting question in a recent post: “what leads to big recessions: wealth or debt”? But I’d like to suggest that it’s actually a confused question. Like: is it the heat or the (relative) humidity that makes you feel so hot? Is it the voltage or the amperage…

Get off my lawn. In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling that promise. There are a large handful of things that make humans uniquely different from animals. In many other…

Is Saving a Sin? If you save more, if everybody collectively saves more, there are more savings, right? There’s more money that firms can borrow and invest to make us all more prosperous. Household saving “funds” business investment, so if we all save more, the world will be more productive and prosperous. You hear this all…

You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” where chimps were trained to exchange inedible tokens for food,…

In a recent post Tyler Cowen makes an admirable effort to lay out his overarching approach to thinking about macroeconomics, revealing the assumptions underlying his understanding of how economies work. (Even more salutary, this has prompted others to do likewise: Nick Rowe, Ryan Avent.) Cowen’s first assertion: In world history, 99% of all business cycles are real business…

My gentle readers will know that I often struggle with economic terminology, both because I find usages are so vague, various, and poorly defined, and because I’m trying to understand fundamental terms’ fundamental meanings. Today I’d like to home in on one of the most fundamental — “assets” — and something even more fundamental that underpins…

The remarkable discussion on “national wealth” and the national accounts that is running over at Interfluidity (373 comments and counting…) in response to my last post prompts me to recount an anecdote that I think is germane. I took exactly one accounting class in my life, at the NYU MBA school — essentially Accounting for…

Modern Monetary Theory has been revolutionary in economics, and its influence is — beneficially — ever-more pervasive. It has opened the eyes of a generation to a clear-eyed, accounting-based methodology that trumps dimensionless theory, and has brought a deep, nuts-and-bolts understanding of money, debt, and financial institutions to a discipline where that understanding has been inexcusably…