Stephanie Kelton, Columnist

The Clock Runs Down on Mainstream Keynesianism

Paul Krugman’s macro framework is leading him astray.

March 4, 2019 at 8:55 PM UTC

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. She was the Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.

Running on MMT time.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Krugman decided to write about modern monetary theory. He didn’t cite the scholarly literature written by any of the academic MMT economists (books, book chapters, published articles or an abundance of other writings).

Instead, he declared that MMT was pretty much just the economist Abba Lerner’s “Functional Finance” approach from the 1940s and offered a critique of Lerner that he maintained was effectively a critique of MMT. I pushed back, situating modern monetary theory in a broader intellectual history.