DRAFT: Review of Alan Blinder: "A Monetary & Fiscal History of þe United States"

2022-10-28 Fr; for Project Syndicate

The big lesson of Alan Blinder’s Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021 <https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Monetary_and_Fiscal_History_of_the_Uni/vM5qEAAAQBAJ> is that there is no big lesson.

There is no linear development.

There is no (or not much) post-WWII “progress” in figuring out how to manage economies for macroeconomic stability.

Rather, Blinder writes:

wheels within wheels, spinning endlessly in time and space… [with] certain themes… waxing and waning… monetary versus fiscal… the intellectual realm… the world of practical policy making… the repeated ascendance and descendance of Keynesianism…

The underlying story is thus that of the Wheel of Fortuna.

Problems appear, and are solved (or not solved), but the solution or non-solution then sets the stage for the emergence of a different problem, to which the economy is more vulnerable because of the actions taken in the recent past. And by the end of the story you feel as though highly similar problems have appeared several times: a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Stable Diffusion via Night Cafe: “Alan Blinder and the Wheel of Fortuna”