Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema

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  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems.

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  Learn more@mercatus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler, which occasionally aspires to be a conversation.

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  Today I'm talking with Scott Sumner.

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  Scott is an extremely well known economist, known perhaps most for his blog the Money Illusion, where he was and still is in fact the world's leading champion of nominal GDP level targeting.

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  Scott has numerous books on monetary theory and history.

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  He also blogs at econlib and he is a long standing Mercatus affiliate.

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  Among other things, for many years he was a professor at Bentley in Massachusetts.

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  Scott, welcome.

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  Oh, thank you.

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  It's good to be here.

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  Now for your books on the Great Depression, you once said that you read the New York Times for many years in a row for I think the 1920s and the 1930s.

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  Monetary theory aside, what was the biggest surprise that you learned about that era?

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  Oh, it's kind of hard to say.

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  I think the thing that felt interesting about it was to see how people saw things as the events played out in real time.

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  So, you know, before I read the New York Times, it was always sort of looking back on history, knowing what we know now about how things played out, and seeing how people interpreted events like the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in real time, I found kind of enlightening and it's kind of hard to put into words exactly why it's enlightening, but it gives you a different perspective, I think, even on current events.

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  And you think they weren't panicked enough or there was a high variance of being panicked or how would you describe it?

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  Well, I think in the case of the rise of the Nazi Party, there was no awareness of how transformative in a negative way the events would be.

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  You'd see things in the New York Times like experts expect Hitler to moderate his views as he gets closer to power.

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  Obviously that did not occur.

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  And also in the field of economics, just seeing how policy shocks were interpreted at the time as compared to how we think of them today.

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