Incentives and Monetary Policy

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Paul Krugman takes on his critics:

One quite common statement among the Austrianish horde is something along the lines of “It’s ridiculous to imagine, as Krugman does, that you can create real wealth by printing more pieces of paper.”

Well, it may be ridiculous, but it’s also true, under certain conditions — namely, when the economy is suffering from inadequate demand. And you don’t have to use highly abstruse reasoning to see this, either; all you need to do is think in terms of some kind of model, not necessarily of the mathematical kind.

In a way, things are even weirder than Krugman suggests. The hard money folks certainly believe in the real-world effects of incentives, and one way of looking at monetary policy is simply as a way of changing incentives. It changes the value of saving vs. spending money. It changes the likely value of real-world investment vs. holding government bonds. It changes inflation expectations, which in turn changes behavior. We can argue about the effect of all this—and we do!—but the proposition that printing money changes incentives, which has an effect on economic behavior and therefore an effect on wealth creation, really shouldn’t be hard to believe intuitively.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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