G. A. Epstein’s critique of MMT re-estimated

Makoto Itoh

Japanese Economy, 2022, vol. 48, issue 2-4, 170-177

Abstract: This is a review article on G. Epstein’s new book What’s Wrong with Modern Money Theory?: A Policy Critique (2019). The first section reviews the main contributions of this book in clarifying the characteristic contents of Modern Money Theory (MMT), and their worrying limitations if applied generally in the world. The second section demonstrates that the Japanese economy in the past decades in fact cannot be a model case to support the applicability of MMT, though it is often cited as a favorable model case for MMT by MMT theorists like R. Wray. We have to wonder and rethink why mere expansive fiscal state policy in cooperation with the central bank could not successfully work for so long, especially from the view of the majority of working people. The third section argues how Marxian political economy can coordinate with such post-Keynesian research fields on monetary policy as MMT. The necessity of a more concrete level of analyses of contemporary capitalism, based on principles of the political economy like in Marx’s Capital and stages theory of capitalist development, is methodologically underlined.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/2329194X.2022.2142612 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:jpneco:v:48:y:2022:i:2-4:p:170-177

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MJES19

DOI: 10.1080/2329194X.2022.2142612

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Japanese Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().