Uneasy Money

About six weeks ago, I was contacted by Jay Pocklington, who leads the Hawtrey Study Group, one of many study groups conducted under the auspices of the Young Scholars Initiative, of The Institute for New Economic Thinking. Jay asked if I would be willing to participate in a zoom conversation with the group about Hawtrey and my interest in, and my engagement with, his work. I was of course happy to accept the invitation, and the conversation took place about two weeks ago on May 26.

The timing was very convenient, because I had just finished working through all of the sixteen essays (both previously published and never published) to be included in a forthcoming volume to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. My limited blogging activity in recent months has been partly due to my need to work on the essays before submitting them for publication. Earlier versions of several of the essays in the volume originally appeared as, or were developed from, posts on this blog, whose tenth anniversary is about to occur four weeks hence. The working title of the volume is Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications.

Before the zoom conversation, I shared a draft of the introductory chapter, which lists eight key ideas that underlie, and are recurrent themes in, the subsequent chapters and explains how those ideas stem from my training as an aspiring young economist at the storied UCLA economics department. The first part of the zoom conversation was prompted by that introductory chapter.

The entire conversation is now posted on Youtube.

Here is the Table of Contents of the volume

Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications

1 Introduction

Part I: Classical Monetary Theory

2 A Reintepretation of Classical Monetary Theory

3 On Some Classical Monetary Controversies

4 The Real Bills Doctrine in the Light of the Law of Reflux

5 Classical Monetary Theory and the Quantity Theory

6 Monetary Disequilibrium in Ricardo and Thornton

7 The Humean and Smithian Traditions in Monetary Theory

8 Rules versus Discretion in Monetary Theory Historically Contemplated

9 Say’s Law and the Classical Theory of Depressions

Part II: Hawtrey, Keynes, and Hayek

10 Good and Bad Trade: A Centenary Retrospective

11 Hawtrey and Keynes

12 Where Keynes Went Wrong

13 Deflation, Debt and the Great Depression (With Ronald Batchelder)

14 Pre-Keynesian Theory of the Great Depression: Whatever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel? (With Ronald Batchelder)

15 Sraffa versus Hayek on the Natural Rate of Interest (With Paul Zimmerman)

16 Hayek, Deflation, Gold and Nihilism

17 Hayek, Hicks, Radner and Four Equilibrium Concepts: Intertemporal, Sequential, Temporary and Rational Expectations