Thread by @JWMason1

A little late, here is the obligatory what-wrote-in-2021 thread. It wasn’t the most productive year for me, but I wrote a number of things I feel good about, including my first-ever bylines in both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

At the start of the year I gave a response to Michael Hudson’s David Gordon lecture on financialization at the (virtual) meetings of the AEA. My part begins at 43:00, but if you’re interested in the topic, you should watch Michael’s preceding talk as well.

Replying to Hudson let me lay out my thoughts on one of the great isms of our times, financialization, and why it’s not helpful to see an opposition of finance vs industrial capital. My comments were published in Review of Radical Political Economics. jwmason.org/wp-content/upl…

Then I did an interview with some folks from Current Affairs, ostensibly about Modern Mone(tar)y Theory. I say ostensibly, because tho we started with MMT the interview gave me a chance to lay out general principles about how to think about the economy. listennotes.com/podcasts/is-mm…

In February, Mike Konczal and I wrote a short piece for the Roosevelt Institute responding to the CBO’s forecast of the output gap, defending the scale of the then still under debate American Rescue Plan. rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/02/01/sti…

I continued to make the case for ARRA with a post for Roosevelt on how Jay Powell departed from conventional wisdom about role of Fed, and made case for fiscal stimulus. I’m not ashamed to have been an objectively pro-Powell voice over the past year. rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/02/25/fed…

In March, after ARRA passed, I wrote a post on how the implicit vision of the economy behind it was a fundamental departure from the past 30 years of conventional wisdom in macroeconomics. Will be worth revisiting at some point how well this has held up. jwmason.org/slackwire/the-…

This post was the most-ever read thing on my blog, which says less about it than about the mood last spring. We were driving back from the Catskills when my wife got a call from a friend saying, “You know David Brooks wrote about Josh in his column today?”nytimes.com/2021/03/25/opi…

In April, Mike and I wrote another post with our colleague Lauren Melodia, on why inflation measures were distorted by the fall in prices early in the pandemic. To be clear, rising prices today, unlike then, are not just a statistical artifact. rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/04/08/the…

In April, I did a presentation at a (virtual) event organized by Roosevelt and the Green New Deal Network, on the macroeconomic case for a Green New Deal. jwmason.org/slackwire/vide…

This spring, I debated Harald Uhlig at Paragraph, on whether Bidenomics was the most irresponsible economic policy in past 40 years. As the topic suggests, the original plan was for me to debate Lawrence Summers, but he backed out and Uhlig was brought in. pairagraph.com/dialogue/bdbc4…

To be honest I sort of feel I should have refused to share a platform with Uhlig, given that he’s not just a conservative economist but a disgusting racist. But would debating Summers have been so different? Not sure what one should do in these situations. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-univer…

In May, I put up a couple blog post with excerpts from the book on money that Arjun Jayadev and I are intermittently working on. Hopefully there will be more such spots in the year to come. jwmason.org/slackwire/the-…
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Also in May, I wrote a post on persistence of shocks to demand. If spending falls 1 percent this year, how much lower will it be 1, 2, or 10 years from now? This got no attention, but I feel like the questions is important and I hope to come back to it. jwmason.org/slackwire/the-…

In June, Mike and I wrote yet another Roosevelt blog post, challenging the view that pandemic unemployment insurance was what was holding back job growth. rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/06/03/zoo…

Also in June, I was on a roundtable at the Jain Family Institute on the financial side of a Green New Deal. I was the cold water I this discussion, arguing that there is no specific problem of financing decarbonization and that green bonds are a dead end. phenomenalworld.org/interviews/inv…

Later in June Mike Konczal and I had an op-ed in the Times arguing that the robust fiscal response to the pandemic had set the stage for a historic economic boom. I still think this is right; I’m sure we’ll be returning to the argument in the year to come. nytimes.com/2021/06/15/opi…

Toward the end of June, Arjun Jayadev and I were interviewed by something called The Age of Economics about, broadly, how economics and economists should be. ageofeconomics.org/interviews/arj…

Continuing the question of how economics should be, in July I was on a roundtable organized by Economists for Inclusive Prosperity on “A New Macroeconomics”. Video of the panel is here: econfip.org/a-new-macroeco…. An edited version of my comments is here: jwmason.org/slackwire/a-ne…

In July, I made one of my occasional contributions to The International Economy, arguing that fears of asset bubbles are overblown. Let’s say bitcoin is worthless; that affects the rest of us how? jwmason.org/slackwire/at-t…

In July, I published - with regular coauthors @rortybomb and @lrmelodia - my biggest paper of the year, Reimagining Full Employment. The idea was to use differences in employment across demographic groups to come up with a number for true full employment. rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/upl…

The takeaway was that if everyone was employed at the same rate as educated white men of the same age, and educated white men at the same rates seen historically, the employment-population ratio could be 10-12 points higher, corresponding to 28 million more people working.

The paper didn't get as much attention as I was hoping, but I still think it was a reasonable way of putting a number of full employment. Was also an attempt to think through how full employment is connected with structures of privilege and inequality in the labor market.

Later in July I published my other widely-read blog post of the year, Alternative Visions of Inflation, arguing that our idea of inflation as a single homogenous process is implicitly based on an outdated monetarist vision of the economy. jwmason.org/slackwire/alte…

The inflation blogpost led to a long conversation with @EricLevitz in New York Magazine, where I tried to explain the conceptual problems with orthodox ideas about full employment and inflation to a broader audience. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

There's a lot of negative things you can say about today's media landscape. But it seems to me that a place like New York opening up its (virtual) pages to these sort of foundational economic debates is a big step forward from the old days.

In August, Boston Review published @arjun_jayadev's and my piece on the neoliberal vision of trade and its alternatives. This one took a long time to get thru the editorial process, but I was happy with the final results. bostonreview.net/articles/beyon…

Also in August, I published another blog post on inflation, offering some guesses about the differences in inflation rates faced by people at different income levels. jwmason.org/slackwire/infl…

In September, I was on a panel hosted by the Washington Center for Suitable Growth, which gave me a chance to debate Atif Mian on what determines interest rates. Fun! Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be video posted anywhere.

In October, I wrote a couple of blog posts thinking thru what people might have in mind when they say that spending should be "paid for".
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I did another interview, this one with Bloomberg, continuing to make the case that the response to the pandemic marks a sharp break from the macroeconomic conventional wisdom of the past 30-plus years. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A blog post at October looked at what we can learn from the Current Population Survey about changes in the distribution of income during the pandemic. jwmason.org/slackwire/a-c-…

A Roosevelt report in November coauthored with @lrmelodia suggested looking to a broader set of tools to respond to inflation, rather than exclusive reliance on the blunt instrument of higher interest rates. rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/upl…

We followed this up with an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that while a smaller stimulus might have resulted in slightly lower inflation, the costs would have far exceeded the benefits. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1…

Finally, in December, I wrote a blog post trying to systematically lay out what Keynesian macroeconomics implies for climate policy (and vice versa). This was a downpayment on a longer piece which I urgently need to get finished. jwmason.org/slackwire/clim…