I am no MMTer but I'm struck by how the basic critique by @Noahpinion of MMT - 'they always claim they are right' - apply to failed mainstream models of economics. None of them got the financial crisis or free trade or shortages.

It's all garbage. All of it.
Price controls are a good idea sometimes and a bad one sometimes. We are imposing controls for shipping right now, which no one in this debate seems to understand. We cannot impose broad price controls because we lack the capacity, which no one in this debate seems to understand.
The point of economics is not to be right or wrong, that's entirely incidental. The point is to develop a political language that excludes normal people from discussing political economy. That is it. mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-is-the-…
Janet Yellen is by all accounts a superb economist, and she is pushing aggressively to remove tariffs on Chinese goods because she thinks it'll address inflation and she's also a free trader. The equations and models reflect collectively insanity, not coherence.

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More from @matthewstoller

Feb 7
1. Ok, this is kind of interesting. NBER's industrial organization section, which is the gathering of economists who study antitrust, just did something that seems a bit odd with regards to its annual conference. nber.org/conferences/in…
2. On day one of their conference, Friday, there was a panel with a bunch of antitrust economists who very much dislike Lina Khan and the new anti-monopoly movement. It was a lively panel, and I watched it. Image
3. Economist @florianederer live-tweeted the panel, and it kicked up something of a storm among those of us who care about the politics of antitrust economics. You can read his thread here.
Read 16 tweets
Feb 7
Now this is a middle finger to antitrust enforcers. nytimes.com/2022/02/07/bus…
For context on all the airline mergers during the Obama administration and what those did to the industry... economicliberties.us/our-work/ctl-a…
When they file their merger notification, that'll be the only time Spirit and Frontier Airlines actually have to pay a fee.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 4
1. There is a major change afoot among antitrust regulators. The FTC's Lina Khan and the Antitrust Division's Jonathan Kanter are not screwing around, and are about to take on all the money and power in the world.

Let's talk merger policy. mattstoller.substack.com/p/mergers-ruin…
2. As anyone who's been through one knows, mergers suck. A few weeks ago, @adamconover described why his show - Adam Ruins Everything - was canceled. The show was popular, but that didn't matter.

AT&T bought Time Warner, and wrecked it.
3. In 2016, AT&T breathlessly announced it would buy Time Warner. We have phones, they have TV shows. What if... people watched TV shows on their phones?!?! Someone forgot to mention that people already did that. But whatever. about.att.com/story/att_to_a…
Read 23 tweets
Feb 4
1. Apple chose to shoot Facebook in the head and move Facebook's ad revenue to Google, because Apple shares in Google's profits.
2. Apple's decision to block tracking on mobile devices significantly harmed Facebook's ad business, which is good. But Apple did not apply the same provisions to Google's mobile services. So ad money moved from FB to Google. Why did Apple do this?
3. It's simple. Google pays Apple something like $15B a year for Google search to be the default on the iPhone's Safari browser. That's at the heart of the DOJ antitrust suit against Google filed in 2020.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 3
The Senate markup on the bill to break app store monopoly power is on deck right now.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein opposes the bill because it targets "three California companies," Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
And now California Senator Alex Padilla is up. He's mostly just trying to avoid getting cross-wise with either big tech, or with labor, which doesn't like big tech.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
I think the most surprising thing I've learned over the last couple of years is just how insane elite liberal institutions have become. I don't really know what to do about it.
The assertive lunacy of most American elite institutions is a widely held opinion within the elites, but unstated publicly because the retribution isn't worth it. I happen to care less about social sanction than most of my peers.
I keep going back to this thread from @AlecMacGillis. In a set of increasingly bizarre moral panics, American liberals have decided to overlook the costs of destroying society.
Read 4 tweets

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