I was surprised to see that George Gilder’s new monograph on the gold standard mentioned me, and disappointed to see that it attributed views to me that I reject. I wrote as much, and now Gilder has responded—kindly but, I’m sorry to say, without correcting himself. He suggests that because he is posing a revolutionary challenge to the “monetarism” allegedly embraced by me and Paul Krugman, he need not attend to the distinctions among different “monetarist” positions.

As those quotation marks suggest, Gilder is using an idiosyncratic definition. In his monograph he defined “monetarists” as “people who believe X and Y,” described me as one even though I believe more or less the reverse of X and Y, and then claimed that the “monetarism” I allegedly hold has been refuted because X and Y are not true.

Krugman, meanwhile, doesn’t think of himself as a monetarist at all, but rather criticizes monetarists (here and here, for example). To justify lumping us both together as “monetarists,” Gilder in his response seems to be using a definition of monetarism that more or less amounts to supporting central banking. And I don’t even meet that definition! I am open to free banking and competitive note issue and have repeatedly noted that central banking has a poor track record. (I just think that while we have a central bank it should do the least damage possible.)

Gilder has been producing luminous insights for decades, and perhaps the monograph contains more. But he does not seem very familiar with the terrain he is exploring.