Scott Sumner Wants His Critics to Respond to His Actual Ideas

     It's funny as I'm waiting for him to respond to the voluminous criticism I've levied at him. The reality is he doesn't like criticism very much and responds to it mostly through hand waving and shadow boxing. 

     "One of the things that makes me believe that we are on the right track is that our Keynesian critics seem unable or unwilling to respond to actual market monetarist arguments, particularly regarding monetary offset of fiscal austerity. "

     http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=28674

     How many times have I and others like Simon Wren Lewis and Paul Waldmann shown that his 'winning bet' against Krugman in 2013 is just in his mind and that the only he makes it look like he does is by setting a very low bar for himself to declare 'victory' and cherry picking the data. 

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/02/sumner-will-do-anything-to-protect.html

     Here he claims that Waldmann is way off base here:

      "Marcus Nunes directed me to another example, this time from Robert Waldmann at Angry Bear:

In any case, Japanese inflation expectations appear to have been successfully managed and to have caused higher output (including construction) as should be the result of the resulting reduced expected real interest rates. It is important to note that the extremely radical expansionary monetary policy was not enough to prevent a recessionstarting Spring 2014 following a 3% increase in the value added tax. Monetary policy at the ZLB isn’t helpless, but it can be overwhelmed by fiscal policy. The assertion that a sufficiently determined monetary authority can target nominal GDP has been pretty much disproven (again).

   This is wrong on so many levels one hardly knows where to begin

    To make his point in Japan he does something similar to what he does in Britain-reinvents certain economic concepts. Like he's now decided that a recession is not defined as 2 straight periods of negative GDP but based on how high or low unemployment is. 

   "Japan did experience two quarters of falling RGDP in 2014, but (despite press reports to the contrary) certainly did not experience a recession.  Or if it did, it would be the first recession year in human history associated with a significant fall in the unemployment rate.  If we could have a “recession” that brought down our unemployment rate to 3.4%, I’d be thrilled."

   Classic Sumner moving the goalposts. For years conservatives have wanted the Fed to ignore employment but now he defines a recession as simply one with high unemployment?

  In reality, Japan for various 'structural' reasons always has low unemployment. They've had low unemployment for 25 years even while all informed observers agree that they've been in 25 years of stagnation-it's possible to have low or slowing GDP and high employment numbers but until now no one suggested that this rules out a economy being in a recession or slowdown. 

     Ralph Musgrave kind of speaks for me here too:

  “Let me know when our critics respond to our actual ideas”? There’s an easy answer to that. Speaking as a Keynsian, “let me know what market monetarists respond the the actual responses that Keynsians have made to market monetarists’ so-called ideas”.

    I do see that Sumner's benefactor, Kenneth Duda, is answering a lot of comments over at Sumner these days. It's kind of impressive. This sounds kind of reasonable:

     "My objective is to build consensus, not win some academic fight. Thus, my biggest concern with market monetarism is the label. I don’t really want to be a “market monetarist” and enter some fray against Keynesians and Austrians and Neo-fisherites and Neoclassicals. Instead, I want to consider a policy regime consisting of NGDPLT (ideally via NGDP futures pegging), plus automatic fiscal stabilizers if NGDP falls too far below target for too long. (I prefer across-the-board tax credits as the automatic fiscal stabilization mechanism, but am open to other ideas.) Call this New Consensus Monetary and Fiscal Policy (NCMFP). It would be a *massive* improvement compared with current policy. Massive. No more 2009, 2010, 2011, or 2012. It should be something that that everyone from Krugman to Cochrane could get behind as, maybe not optimal, and they’d all have different gripes, but maybe they can all agree that this combination is better than current policy. This would be a consensus policy view that we can all push forward, and set aside our somewhat different models and a different intuition about which model fits the real world the best at any given time."

    If he's not trying to win an academic fight or enter some fray he apparently forgot to tell Sumner that.