Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
Johan Myhrman is rather critical of the Stockholm School considered as a group of monetary economists, and with one partial exception that I shall note below, I share his qualms. Let it be clear, though, that our doubts arise because we have a particular view about what constitutes “good” monetary economics and a particular view about the historical development of the ideas we find particularly attractive. This view is not one that is universally shared by respectable monetary economists even today, let alone in the 1930s, and so the position Myhrman takes, though eminently defensible, is nevertheless bound to be controversial. It will help to place his work in context if I briefly and explicitly describe the vision of “good” monetary economics that underlies it. Myhrman and I would both, I think, loosely characterise overselves as “quantity theorists,” and by that we would mean the following: that the critical (though not the only) variable to be explained by monetary economics is the general price level, and that pride of place should be given to the quantity of money (suitably defined, and I shall return to this point in a moment) as an explanatory variable here. Moreover, we would both deploy a stock supply and demand apparatus in constructing any explanation of the connection between money and prices. Thus our conception of “good” monetary economics involves some kind of an amalgamation of the best insights of Wicksell and Marshall as developed by, among others, Keynes and Friedman.
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