I’ve certainly made no secret about how important monetary economics is to my thinking, but I also have never clearly laid out the arguments that convinced me of monetarism, let alone explained its central theories. This isn’t by design. There’s almost an introduction to monetarism already on this blog, if you’re willing to piece together thirty footnotes on ten different posts. It is obviously the case that no one wants to do this. Therefore, I’d like to try something else: a succinct explanation of monetary economics, written as clearly as possible and without any simplifying omissions or obfuscations, but free of (unexplained) jargon.

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So, there’s this thing that happens in certain intellectual communities, like (to give a totally random example) social psychology. This thing is that novel takes are rewarded. New insights are rewarded. Figuring out things that no one has before is rewarded. The high-status people in such a community are the ones who come up with and disseminate many new insights.

On the face of it, this is good! New insights are how we get penicillin and flight and Pad Thai burritos. But there’s one itty bitty little problem with building a culture around it.

Good (and correct!) new ideas are a finite resource.

This isn’t news. Back in 2005, John Ioannidis laid out the case for “most published research findings” being false. It turns out that when you have a small chance of coming up with a correct idea even using statistical tests for to find false positives can...

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When you’re noticing that you’re talking past someone, what does it look like? Do you feel like they’re ignoring all the implications of the topic at hand (“yes, I know the invasion of Iraq is causing a lot of pain, but I think the important question is, ‘did they have WMDs?’”)? Or do you feel like they’re avoiding talking about the object-level point in favour of other considerations (“factory farmed animals might suffer, but before we can consider whether that’s justified or not, shouldn’t we decide whether we have any obligation to maximize the number of living creatures?”)?

I’m beginning to suspect that many tense disagreements and confused, fruitless conversations are caused by differences in how people conceive of and process the truth. More, I think I have a model that explains why some people can productively disagree with anyone and everyone, while others get frustrated very easily with even...

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The Economist wonders why wage growth isn’t increasing, even as unemployment falls. A naïve reading of supply and demand suggests that it should, so this has become a relatively common talking point in the news, with people of all persuasions scratching their heads. The Economist does it better than most. They at least talk about slowing productivity growth and rising oil prices, instead of blaming everything on workers (for failing to negotiate) or employers (for not suddenly raising wages).

But after reading monetary policy blogs, the current lack of wage growth feels much less confusing to me. Based on this, I’d like to offer one explanation for why wages haven’t been growing. While I may not be an economist, I’ll be doing my best to pass along verbatim the views of serious economic thinkers.

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When you worry about rising inequality, what are you thinking about?

I now know of two competing models for inequality, each of which has vastly different implications for political economy.

In the first, called consumptive inequality, inequality is embodied in differential consumption. Under this model, there is a huge gap between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (net worth: $60 billion), with his private islands, his yacht, etc. and myself, with my cheap rented apartment, ten-year-old bike, and modest savings. In fact, under this model, there’s even a huge gap between Larry Ellison with all of his luxury goods and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (net worth: $90.6 billion), with his relatively cheap house and restrained tastes.

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