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by etripe 2403 days ago
You're taking the least charitable interpretation of that sentence, reading it as "all" or "most" economist teaching government's primary role is price stability. That is apparently false (I'll take your word for it).

In a more charitable reading, he's reacting to one or a few instances where it is taught but shouldn't. That could be accurate, if contextually misleading and possibly myopic.

Discounting his argument based on factual errors is fine, but given that you only bring one counterpoint to the table, "another non-economist getting famous for criticizing economics from a position of comprehensive ignorance" sounds like an argument from authority.

1 comments

I don't see how anything in the text permits that charitable reading. Even the inventor of monetarism itself, Milton Friedman, thought that the government could prevent recessions -- he just thought that the best way to do that was to target the money supply, so you get price stability and no recessions all at once. The whole point of his and Schwartz The Monetary History of the United States is that drops in the money supply are linked to recessions.