Schrödinger’s debt
Today the agencies report this externalization of Professor Giavazzi (an old friend of the blog):
He says, "And what's the problem? Are these statements wrong?"
No, far from it! They are almost all correct, especially for the part that distinguishes between supply and demand inflation, which we clarified here almost four months ago .
He says: "So what? Do you want to maliciously insinuate that it is strange that Professor Giavazzi says something right !?"
No, absolutely not, it's not strange at all. Every now and then it happens to him (as it happens to me too), and another famous example is this :
(but I could also mention this , which unfortunately is no longer spoken: see below ).
He says: "Embè? So you just want us to understand that you are cooler because you get there before him? It seems a bit immature attitude, it could have been fine a few years ago, when the blog had a goliardic tone, but now. .. ".
Let alone! On the contrary! I have other things to do than affirm my presumed intellectual supremacy over academic colleagues. Unfortunately I have abandoned, I fear forever, the fairies of ANVUR and VQR (yesterday I had to entertain with them, perhaps for the last time, in the company of the Sherpa Romeo: the insiders will understand …). Now, unfortunately or fortunately, I have other objectives: I think positive and proactive, because this must be the spirit of the good majority parliamentarian.
Or not?
However, the accounts are soon done, linearizing. If 2471 days ago Professor Giavazzi took us 1391 days to get to where we started (ie from the observation that the "sovereign debt crisis" depended on everything except sovereign debt), and today (that is, 2471 days later) it took only 113 days to reach us on the observation that a restrictive monetary policy is ineffective and counterproductive against supply inflation , it means that every 2471 days Professor Giavazzi fills the gap that separates us by 1391-113 = 1278 days, which means that in 218 days we will be perfectly in sync, and from 18 January 2023 I will have to resign myself to being the follower (the one who trudges).
I'll make up my mind: the important thing is not who comes first to say the right thing, but that the number of slight inaccuracies in circulation is limited.
In this regard, unfortunately, I must however point out that there is a problem.
It would be negligible, we could and perhaps we should overlook it, but here we have always had scruple to stick to the truth of the facts, so we must make an emphasis. The Giavazzi that in September 2015 "the problem is not the public debt" (and in fact it had not been) was however the same as that in 2011 "we have to put a progressive tax on capital income because public debt is a problem":
and I think it is also the same that today tells us that the PNRR (which is debt) will lower the spread that is caused … by the debt (!), which therefore … is a problem again:
This Schrödinger debt thing, which makes the spread fall while it grows, is objectively beautiful. We are quantum economics, which is, I admit without hesitation, something aesthetically superior to the flat and gray quantitative economics you have been accustomed to here in so many hard years of (your) apprenticeship!
So what?
And so I have the feeling that on some really substantive issues, like this one:
(who was not far from the positions of the late David Sassoli ) we do not want or are unable to affect, due to unfavorable power relations from which no real or presumed reputational shield can protect us, and that this basic contradiction reverberates, down their branches, sprouting from branch to branch a plethora of other contradictions which, if the situation in the country were not desperate, would also be amusing.
But unfortunately the situation in the country does not lead to happiness .
So?
So nothing: we've talked about it for a decade, don't make me start over …
Good night and good luck!
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2022/06/il-debito-di-schrodinger.html on Mon, 13 Jun 2022 15:20:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.