Dumb ideas are dumb ideas no matter who proposes them, and should be treated as such.
Dumb ideas are dumb ideas no matter who proposes them, and should be treated as such.
E arly last year, the socialist writer Freddie deBoer observed that:
In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition.
At Axios today, Emily Peck offers up a lovely example of the shift deBoer describes. In an attempt to defend the travesty that is “Modern Monetary Theory,” Peck ignores the substance of the debate completely, and focuses instead on sex. “Male economists,” she writes, “are freaking out over a NYT profile” of MMT’s chief evangelist, Stephanie Kelton. “The gender dynamics,” she adds, “look terrible here.”
Do they? We are not expected to believe, I hope, that women cannot be wrong, ill-informed, or even stupid. And, if women can be wrong, ill-informed, or even stupid, then we should surely expect that they will be criticized — by men and women alike — in the same way as everyone else who is wrong, ill-informed, or even stupid. In her piece, Peck provides just two examples of men “piling on” and “freaking out” about the Times’s profile in particular and Kelton’s ideas more generally. The first comes from former secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who wrote on Twitter a couple of days ago that he was “sorry to see the @nytimes taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement” because “it is the equivalent of publicizing fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories.” The second comes from Noah Smith, “a well-known economist and former Bloomberg columnist” who “wrote a Substack post calling the article ‘bad.’”
Bad? Well, knock me over with a feather!
Because she has been colonized by an obscure, confusing, extreme, and bizarre ideology, it seems not to have occurred to Peck that both Summers and Smith believe, quite genuinely, that the ideas that Kelton is selling are “faddish” and “quackish,” and that the Times article that was written about those ideas and their progenitor was . . . well, “bad.” Likewise, Peck seems not to have noticed that Summers took aim at MMT “as an intellectual movement” — and not at Kelton or her gender per se — while Smith did precisely the opposite of focusing on Kelton’s womanhood, complaining instead that Jeanna Smialek’s article “describes Kelton’s clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood, her blog, her manner of speaking, her personal story, and so on” instead of “the background of the macroeconomic policy debate,” which background he then waded into at length. Suffice it to say that if anyone involved in this debate is being inappropriate, it is Peck.
Attempting to flesh out her hit piece, Peck asserts indignantly that “economics is a predominantly white, male field, and women and people of color [within it] often face fierce resistance and hostility.” But, again, this is Peck’s focus, rather than Summers’s or Smith’s. Yes, in this case, the economic theory that is being knocked around has been advanced by a woman. But where is the evidence that men get a pass from each other for their theories? Are our Aristarchs generous when they talk about the shortcomings of Marx, or Keynes, or Friedman? Do critics of supply-side reforms or of the Laffer Curve pull their punches? Is Robert Reich always impeccably polite when debating other men? Was George H. W. Bush simply being sardonic when he accused Ronald Reagan of practicing economic “voodoo”? Of course not. There is nobody in his right mind who could look at our present political divisions and conclude that male solidarity has ushered in an artificial era of good feeling in the dismal science.
Ultimately, Peck’s approach is not just profoundly anti-intellectual — although it is certainly that, for by explicit design she has substituted a debate over ideas for a debate over genitals — it is also a gussied-up form of special pleading. Modern Monetary Theory is considered by its detractors to be one of the most foolish, self-serving, and dangerous economic ideas to have been proposed in a generation. If those detractors were to decline to attack it on the grounds that its most famous advocate is a woman, they would be engaging in precisely the sort of infantilizing sexism that Peck believes herself to be fighting against.
Now those would be some — what was it again? — “terrible gender dynamics.”