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Keynes has been discredited in recent years, it's odd that you think he's established anything. The Austrians were proven right and recent monetary policy refle
by nvm0n2 3y ago
Keynes has been discredited in recent years, it's odd that you think he's established anything. The Austrians were proven right and recent monetary policy reflects their view - you don't see much discussion of Keynes anymore. If you don't understand Keynes maybe that's why you don't realise that?
To recap Keynes: his core idea was countercyclical monetary policy, i.e. to issue debt (print money) when times are bad and pay down debt (recall money) when times are good.
It sounds good but the Austrians pointed out that there would be two problems in practice:
1. Give governments a nice sounding justification for money printing and they will do it to excess, creating inflation. The Austrians were right: governments cited Keynes when printing money in a recession, and then the "emergency measures" would conveniently never end. The part where you pay down the debt in good times by running a primary surplus would never be respected.
2. Keynes misunderstood the nature and cause of recessions.
Recessions occur when there has been widespread misallocation of resources, usually due to some collective delusion or state mismanagement. The groupthink breaks and people realize that their investments are duds. Credit is withdrawn, investments cease and there's a giant sucking sound as people lose their jobs whilst those who still have money try to figure out what to do next.
Keynes posited that recessions are quasi-natural disasters that just inexplicably happen, and that the fix is for the government to spend money to balance them out. But this isn't the case and so his fix just makes things worse. It may appear to end the recession if all you look at is a handful statistics, but the underlying misallocation still occurred and when governments step in desperate to create employment - any employment - they misallocate resources still further. Like someone taking stimulants to try and delay the end of the party, it works for a while but they get more and more messed up. There's lots of activity but not much is actually useful. Governments don't care though, because all they're trying to do is keep people digging proverbial holes and filling them back up again.
You can drown the signals of a recession by misallocating resources still further, but it's not a good idea.
Keynesianism has worked out in the past 15 years exactly as the Austrians always said it would, and now Austrian economics is back in vogue. The 2008 recession led to the ZIRP years of easy money that never ended, even when the economy was booming. Government debt climbed endlessly. Inflation span out of control and now interest rates have been hiked repeatedly even though the economy was trashed by lockdowns - exactly the moment Keynes said to do the opposite.
- dfe 3y agoI've been lurking on HN for years, and I just created an account to thank you for this post. I always had this gut feeling that the Keynesianism in the aftermath of 2008 was a really bad idea but economics isn't my space and I don't care to argue with politicos about economics. This explains it really well. So... now what?
- elktown 3y agoIf so, you need to adjust your critical thinking skills. Deeply unnuanced posts about highly debated topics - like the one you replied to - should set off alarm bells. Unless you think that a random HN user (with a very dodgy comment history) can just "set the record straight" after a few decades of debate.
- nvm0n2 3y agoYou're welcome! What now? Well, economics isn't really that complex. Rule 1. Don't print money - it distorts the natural flow of information and incentives through the market, leading to misallocations. Rule 2. Get rid of fractional reserve banking. It's an unnatural privilege that other companies would be forbidden from engaging in (it's considered fraud if you don't have a banking license). This forces all interest bearing investment to take place through funds that expose their actual risks and liquidity constraints to investors. When it's possible to save money risk free because banks can't loan it out and there's no monetary inflation, the moral hazard evaporates and you can allow funds to collapse if they make persistently bad investments. There is no longer any need for bank bailouts. Recessions can still happen in such a world, because mass hysteria and utopian thinking is a part of human nature. There's no law you can pass to stop people getting over-excited about dotComs or AI startups. You just have to let people work out the true value of these things themselves.
- naveen99 3y agoI like your analysis elsewhere. But you can’t avoid misallocations always. Some risk has to be taken by everyone. Even the private markets miscalculate roi. You also can’t avoid debt (printing money). At the simplest, you can tell yourself you will postpone your own retirement to take the risk of misallocating resources yourself, for a gamble.