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

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found his largest audience through blogging in his 50s and 60s, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet this unconventional journey led him to become one of the most influential monetary thinkers of the past two decades.

Scott joins Tyler to discuss what reading Depression-era newspapers revealed about Hitler's rise, when fiat currency became viable, why Sweden escaped the worst of the 1930s crash, whether bimetallism ever made sense, where he'd time-travel to witness economic history, what 1920s Hollywood movies get wrong about their era, how he developed his famous maxim "never reason from a price change," whether the Fed can ever truly follow policy rules like NGDP targeting, if Congress shapes monetary policy more than we think, the relationship between real and nominal shocks, his favorite Hitchcock movies, why Taiwan's 90s cinema was so special, how Ozu gets better with age, whether we'll ever see another Bach or Beethoven, how he ended up at the University of Chicago, what it means to be a late bloomer in academia, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded December 27th, 2024.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:25.9	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler, which occasionally aspires
0:31.3	to be a conversation.
0:32.9	Today I'm talking with Scott Sumner.
0:35.3	Scott is an extremely well-known economist, known perhaps most for his
0:40.0	blog The Money Illusion, where he was, and still is, in fact, the world's leading champion of nominal GDP
0:46.1	level targeting. Scott has numerous books on monetary theory and history. He also blogs at Econ Lib,
0:53.9	and he is a long-standing Mercatus affiliate,
0:56.7	among other things. For many years, he was a professor at Bentley in Massachusetts. Scott,
1:02.1	welcome. Oh, thank you. It's good to be here. Now, for your books on the Great Depression,
1:07.9	you once said that you read the New York Times for many years in a row for, I think, the 1920s and the 1930s. Monetary theory aside, what was the biggest surprise that you learned about that era?
1:20.3	Oh, it's kind of hard to say. I think the thing that felt interesting about it was to see how people saw things as the events played out in real time.
1:30.7	So, you know, before I read the New York Times, it was always sort of looking back on history,
1:36.6	knowing what we know now about how things played out, and seeing how people interpreted events
1:42.9	like the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, in real time, I found kind of enlightening.
1:48.7	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.
1:57.5	And you think they weren't panicked enough? Or there was a high variance of being panicked?
2:02.4	Or how would you describe it? Well, I think, you know, in the case of the rise of the Nazi party,
	...

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