Puff pieces, Ben Rhodes, Michael Crichton and Economics

The New York Times has another puff piece masquerading as real reporting, Time For a Victory Lap* by Jeanna Smialek subtitled "*Some terms and conditions apply. Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits."

Resurrects once again the Ben Rhodes observation:

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

And Michael Crichton's coinage, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Regrettably, Jeanna Smialek covers the Federal Reserve for the NYTs so she ought to be writing from a position of knowledge.

Noah Smith in The NYT article on MMT is really bad highlights the legion of errors and misstatements, or simply absence of awareness.  The subheading is "The fringe ideology's star is falling, and puff pieces will not resuscitate it."  

The New York Times just came out with a big glowing writeup of MMT, entitled “Time for a Victory Lap*”. This article aroused the anger of just about every macroeconomist on Twitter, and with good reason — it demonstrates very little understanding of the issues at play or the state of the policy debate, and it rhetorically elevates a fringe ideology to a position of importance and centrality that it neither occupies nor deserves.

Please consult macroeconomists before writing about MMT! 

 

The NYT article on MMT, written by Jenna Smialek, is mostly a puff piece about Stephanie Kelton, MMT’s most well-known proponent. In glowing tones, it describes Kelton’s clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood, her blog, her manner of speaking, her personal story, and so on, calling her “the star architect of a movement that is on something of a victory lap”. Very little is written about the background of the macroeconomic policy debate, and what does appear is highly questionable

Which one might dismiss as professional jealousy or sour grapes except that he provides all the evidence to support his argument.  At length.  

His article, unlike the NYT's one, is worth a read.