Is modern monetary theory nutty or essential?

“MODERN MONETARY THEORY” sounds like the subject of a lecture destined to put undergraduates to sleep. But among macroeconomists MMT is far from soporific. Stephanie Kelton, a leading MMT scholar at Stony Brook University, has advised Bernie Sanders, a senator and presidential candidate. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young flag-bearer of the American left, cites MMT when asked how she plans to pay for a Green New Deal. As MMT’s political stock has risen, so has the temperature of debate about it. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner and newspaper columnist, recently complained that its devotees engage in “Calvinball” (a game in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” in which players may change the rules on a whim). Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary now at Harvard University, recently called MMT the new “voodoo economics”, an insult formerly reserved for the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves. These arguments are loud, sprawling and difficult to weigh up. They also speak volumes about macroeconomics.

MMT has its roots in deep doctrinal fissures. In the decades after the Depression economists argued, sometimes bitterly, over how to build on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, macroeconomics’ founding intellect. In the end, a mathematised, American strain of Keynesianism became dominant, while other variants were lumped into the category of “post-Keynesianism”: an eclectic mix of ideas consigned to the heterodox fringe. In the 1990s a number of like-minded thinkers drew on post-Keynesian ideas in fleshing out the perspective embodied in MMT.