An Agnostic Invocation

An illustration of a traditional Christian conception of Heaven

Last Sunday, in my post “An Agnostic Grace,” I described a possible pattern for a mealtime blessing appropriate for agnostics who lean toward non-supernaturalism, but have some Christian background themselves or are aware that some Christians are also present for the meal. In this post, I want to modify that ritual to make it appropriate for opening a  religious gathering sensitive to the presence of agnostics, such as Unitarian Universalist Sunday services, or a small group meeting of Unitarian Universalists. But I want to stress that this invocation could work well in any religious gathering where the intent was to  make agnostics feel welcome. The theological background for this agnostic invocation is discussed in “An Agnostic Grace,” and in my post “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life.”

From the beginning:

May this gathering uplift our hearts, enlighten our minds, and inspire our endeavors to bring us closer to, and glorify, the God or Gods Who May Be.

This is then followed by extemporaneous expressions of one or more of the following:

  • Gratitude: (We are thankful …)
  • Hopes: (We hope …)
  • Concerns (We are concerned …)
  • Worries (We are worried about …)
  • Thoughts (We are thinking of …)
  • Additional wishes (May …)
  • etc., in no particular order

The final words are:

And may we understand more fully the mystery of the humanity we all share, and act as one family to bring this Earth nearer to Heaven. Amen.

Duncan Green: Lant Pritchett v. the Randomistas on the Nature of Evidence—Is a Wonkwar Brewing? →

I find this post by Duncan Green about the direction of the field of Economic Development especially interesting because I know people on both sides of this debate. I met Lant Pritchett when he was in graduate school at MIT and I was at Harvard since we were both in the same Mormon congregation at that time, and my wife Gail and I have kept up with Lant and his wife Diane to some degree in the years that followed. On the other side of the debate, several of my colleagues are involved in randomized controlled trials in the developing world.

Steven Johnson: We're Living the Dream, We Just Don't Realize It →

In my post “The True Story of How Economics Got Its Nickname ‘The Dismal Science,’” I told how economics got its nickname “the dismal science” as a result of the opposition of John Stuart Mill (who was a noted economist as well as philosopher) to slavery. But the nickname sticks partly because people think of economists as bearers of bad news. But in fact, economists are prominent among those who remind people that over the long haul “Things Are Getting Better.” Steven Johnson’s article “We’re Living the Dream, We Just Don’t Realize It” has the same message.  For a book-length treatment of this theme, I recommend The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. 

The economic slump we are in will someday be over. We should not let it falsely color our picture of the broad, progressive sweep of modern history. 

Joe Weisenthal on Mark Carney, Who is Moving from Bank of Canada Chief to Bank of England Chief →

The UK made the unusual move of appointing a Canadian as head of the Bank of England. I applaud this small step toward a more global market in central bankers. Sometimes, the best candidate is a foreigner, even after taking political and national security concerns into account.

In this article, Joe Weisenthal expresses his admiration for Mark Carney’s record as head of the Bank of Canada.

How African Statistics are Worse and African Economies are Better than You Think →

This is an interesting summary on the African Arguments website of the book “Poor Numbers: How We are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It” by Morten Jerven. There are many problems with government economic statistics in Africa. But the emphasis in this summary is that by using historical weights they often give much too much weight to declining or stagnant sectors of an economy as compared to the growing, dynamic sectors of an economy. Thus, much of the economic growth is missed.   

Time for the Paperless Revolution? Tomas Hirst Interviews Miles about Electronic Money →

This interview of me by Tomas Hirst, “Time for the Paperless Revolution?” was prompted by my two Quartz columns on electronic money: 

Also, note my recent post on electronic money:

I anticipate more to come on electronic money.

An Agnostic Grace

Thanksgiving-time made me think about the custom of saying grace at mealtimes to give thanks to God. Unitarian-Universalism encourages people to develop rituals that accord with their own personal beliefs, so I wanted to come up with a way of “saying grace” that would be appropriate for an agnostic like me, but that would also be appropriate in an ecumenical context where some who do believe affirmatively in God are also present. In my own case, my Mormon Christian relatives are very accepting of my beliefs, but I also wanted to be sensitive to their beliefs. Here is what I came up with.

To begin with, the invocation of a possible God or Gods is combined with a mention of the mealtime occasion:  

May the works that we do, sustained by this food, bring us closer to, and glorify, the God or Gods Who May Be.

This is then followed (in line with the Mormon custom of extemporaneous content in prayers) by expressions of one or more of the following:

  • Gratitude: (We are thankful …)
  • Hopes: (We hope …)
  • Concerns (We are concerned …)
  • Worries (We are worried about …)
  • Thoughts (We are thinking of …)
  • Additional wishes (May …)
  • etc., in no particular order

Finally, in a context in which the gathering includes mostly agnostics and Christians:

And we remember Jesus Christ, symbol of all that is good in humankind, and thereby clue to the God or Gods Who May Be. Amen.      

Let me comment on some of the choices I made in the language above:

  1. I thought it important to put the emphasis on doing good works (working toward “saving the world” in whatever ways we can, however small) rather than on the food. So the good works are mentioned first. 
  2. The phrase “Who May Be” has two different interpretations. I am a teleotheist: a theology I explore in my post “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life.” Teleotheism is the belief that God comes at the end of history rather than at the beginning. So I interpret “Who May Be” as a future possibility. But it can also refer to a present possibility.    
  3. To me, the phrase “God or Gods” with its key word “or” is important as an affirmation of agnosticism. In “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life,” I propose this definition of God: “The greatest of all things that can come true.”  Even by this definition, it is unclear whether there is one God or many, since there could be multiple judgments by different people about what "the greatest of all things that can come true” is. To count as multiple Gods, these different Gods would have to be logically compatible. Also, given our lack of knowledge, if God is the greatest of all things that can come true, it seems reasonable to me to characterize God grammatically as a “who” rather than a “what,” even if that may ultimately turn out to be stretching the English language. In any case, “God or Gods Who May Be” should have some acceptable interpretation to most of the others in the gathering, if they come with an ecumenical spirit.   
  4. The final sentence, “Amen” is a traditional ending to prayers in Judaism, Christianity and often in Islam. It is from Hebrew and means “So be it.” In addition to that meaning, it has the practical function of indicating that the ritual is completed.  
  5. The theological background to the rest of my ending is in this passage from “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life,” in which I am exploring what the “greatest of all things that could come true” might be:

Let’s start with the easier question of what an ideal human being looks like.Here I look to Jesus.Not the historical Jesus, but the imagined Jesus who is the projection of every good human trait, as valued by our culture.It makes all the sense in the world to ask “what would Jesus do” even if one believes that the historical Jesus was only a man, since “what would Jesus do” is a good shorthand for what our culture thinks a good person would do.This is an example of the way in which many of the highest ideas of goodness in Western Culture are embedded in religious language.

From a Christian perspective, while “we remember Jesus Christ, symbol of all that is good in humankind, and thereby clue to the God or Gods Who May Be” falls far short of affirming the divinity of Jesus Christ, it accords at least weakly with the standard Christian teachings that Jesus Christ came to earth as a revelation of God the Father, and an example to humankind of how to live, and it accords with the statement in Genesis that humankind was created in the image of God, so that human goodness gives us a clue to the goodness of God.

To give a backstory for why I would want to create a ritual like this, let me tell you my beliefs that

  1. We should each adhere to the truth as we see it, rather than trying to believe in a “noble lie,” and
  2. Human beings need religion even if there is no God. Here is why: 

Religion is the “everything else” category in our existence in human societies and as individuals after parceling out the things people understand fairly well about human life–just as “natural philosophy” used to be the “everything else” category after parceling out as natural sciences the things people were beginning to understand fairly well about the natural world.

There is still a great deal we don’t understand well enough about our existence in human societies and as individuals to parcel out as generally understood social science knowledge. I am defining “religion” as encompassing all of those areas touching on our human existence where we are still groping for answers and for the meaning of things (or for a meaning of things), even if one has ruled out supernatural answers.

I can now say that this way of saying grace is road-tested. In the last week, I have had occasion to say grace in this way twice, and found it suited those occasions well. It felt more natural in practice than it may seem on this page.

You can see my other posts on religion, culture, humanities, philosophy and science at the link

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/tagged/religionhumanitiesscience

which is also at my sidebar.

How Marginal Tax Rates Work

Here is an exercise. What is wrong with the way the people quoted below are thinking?

1. Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.

“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said.

2. … [the extra money that comes with a raise] “is nice, but it could very well bump you into the next tax bracket, possibly leaving you with less money than you had before the raise.”

For an answer, see the wikipedia entry on “Tax Rate” and Matthew Yglesias’s posts “Nobody Understands How Taxes Work,”  “Tax Whiners Don’t Understand How Marginal Tax Rates Work,” and “Tax Ignoramuses.”  

The Wonderful, Now Suppressed, Republican Study Committee Brief on Copyright Law →

This is an excellent policy brief that is a well-written, fast, easy read. You can still see it here.  Alex Tabarrok flagged it here. And Matthew Yglesias has a great discussion of the politics and the economic merits in his post “The Case of the Vanishing Policy Memo.” But on the economic merits, the policy brief speaks well for itself. 

The supplysideliberal Style Guide for Referring to Public Figures

I wanted to elevate this comment to my post “Whither the GOP,” and my reply to it, to the status of a post. Here is the comment from Tom in Tempe: 

I’ve just got to remark on your continued use of first names for President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney.  Neither is Barack nor Mitt in polite conversation.  They are as stated in the first sentence.  Please show due respect to our leadership.  The last thing we need is to grind down our leaders into the dirt of the common.

Tom in Tempe

Here is my reply:

I feel strongly that we all need to be reminded that our leaders are all fallible humans. For leaders one likes, the reminder of fallibility is most important. For leaders one doesn’t like, the reminder of humanity is most important.

In America, economists always typically call each other by their first names, regardless of how eminent an economist is. To me, that is a good reminder that it is the quality of the ideas being discussed at any time that matters, not someone’s reputation.

At another level, I feel that what the blood of our ancestors bought in the American Revolution was the right to treat all human beings as equals. We have no king that we bow to. As Americans, we all stand on an equal footing.

My custom of using first names for public figures and well as private individuals (which has some exceptions for the sake of clarity, rhetorical effect, and deferring to the sensibilities of editors, hosts or coauthors) began when I realized I had fallen into referring to the two presidential candidates as “Mitt” and “Obama,” and needed to resolve the asymmetry.   

Deference and outward shows of respect to position certainly have their place in society, but a blogger’s role is often to challenge public figures and put them in the searchlight, not to put them on a pedestal. Psychologically, referring to public figures by their first names helps me to do that.

Previously, I explained my custom of using first names in these words:

Style Guide Note: In order to emphasize the equality of all human beings, in posts appearing on supplysideliberal.com, I lean toward referring to public figures as well as others by their first names. (Of course, I only follow that rule as long as it does not get in the way of clarity or conflict too much with other stylistic considerations. I am less consistent in using first names in tweets, since there, readers don’t have as much chance to get used to it.)

I should mention here that every human being is a marvel in the universe. (Of course, biologically, even dirt is a marvel. And human beings are more than dirt.) So to treat someone properly as a human being, equal to other human beings, is to treat them with high respect.

More on the History of Thought for Negative Nominal Interest Rates

Thanks to a tweet from Migeru, I learned this morning of Willem Buiter’s post on negative nominal interest rates, “Negative interest rates: when are they coming to a central bank near you,” which discusses in detail the idea of paper currency that depreciates relative to electronic currency (with the electronic currency serving as the unit of account), which plays such an important role in my post “How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation,” (which is primarily a link to my Quartz column “E-Money: How paper currency is holding the US recovery back.”)

I consider paper currency that depreciates relative to electronic currency when there is a need for a negative nominal interest rate, and then gradually appreciates back to par when it is OK to have positive nominal interests to be superior to Silvio Gesell’s proposal of currency that is stamped after interest is paid on it. I would be glad to know more of the history of thought for the idea of paper currency that depreciates relative to electronic currency in low-interest-rate periods and then gradually appreciates back to par in higher-interest-rate periods.

Brendan Bowen champions Gesell’s proposal in his post “The case for negative interest rates now.” I learned that from Donald Pretari’s comment to Willem’s post (the second comment). Donald also refers to a Martin Wolf comment with the reference to Brad DeLong’s post on Gesell: “Silvio Gesell and Stamped Money: Another Thing Fisher and Wicksell Knew That Modern Economists Have Forgotten.”

Debora Spar on the Dilemma of Modern Women

Debora Spar has what I feel is good advice for modern women in her Daily Beast essay “Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect.” I have no first-person authority on dilemmas that women face, but having been born in 1960, I watched the Second Wave of Feminism and the Third Wave of Feminism with interest from their inceptions. I recommended this essay to my daughter.

Debora has useful things to say about how inequality in the sharing of household burdens–and in particular, the unequal sharing of child care–affects how women fare in the workforce as well:

…women who juggle children and jobs will still face a discrete and serious set of tensions that simply don’t confront either men (except in very rare cases) or women who remain childless….

Another piece of the puzzle sits closer to home, where parity remains frustratingly elusive and women still consistently log more hours than their mates. Between 1965 and 2000, the number of working mothers in the United States rose from 45 to 78 percent of all mothers, and the average time that an American woman spent in the paid labor force increased from 9 to 25 hours a week. Yet women were still devoting nearly 40 hours a week to family care: housework, child care, shopping. Men, by contrast, spent only 21, most of which were devoted to fairly discrete and flexible tasks like mowing the lawn, washing the car, and tossing softballs with the kids. (Try this. See who in any household schedules the kids’ dental appointments. My own husband, lovely though he is, seems not to be aware that our children even have teeth.)

At work, Debora points out how the true marginal products of women are often underestimated because women are less boastful than men and because the ways in which they contribute to balanced decision-making and the output of others are not fully counted:

Let me say what is often forbidden: women may differ from men in a whole range of important ways. In the aggregate, as research has shown, they may be less comfortable with outsize risk than men, and more inclined toward caution. They may be less directly confrontational, and slower to boast of their talents and successes. They may prize consensus over discord and favor personal relationships over hierarchical ones. Rather than wishing these differences away, or pretending they don’t exist, we need to analyze them, understand them, and then talk to one another about how best to create a world shaped by a diversity of styles and patterns; a world driven by women’s skills and interests and passions as much as by men’s.

Debora also has some wise words about the costs of political correctness:

Thankfully, the time for this evolution is now ripe. Millions of men have watched their daughters play soccer, their mothers launch companies, their sisters struggle to compete. They have invested in female employees who subsequently quit and have wondered, later in their own lives, whether they asked their wives to sacrifice too much on their behalf. Most of these men genuinely want women to succeed.

But they don’t know how to make the right changes and are generally not party to the conversations that women have among themselves. All too often, women are scared of raising the topic of gender with men, thinking it will brand them as radicals or troublemakers, while men are terrified of saying or doing anything that might classify them as politically incorrect. The result, of course, is that no one says anything productive at all. Women mutter to themselves about their continued exploitation, men mumble platitudes and hire high-priced diversity consultants, and nothing changes.

Finally, Debora has two key pieces of advice for women juggling both work and children in the world as it is now: 

  1. Let some things go.  
  2. If you can’t live near extended family, try to put together a group of friends who can serve as a surrogate extended family.

I like both of these points. On the first point, let me add this thought of my own:

If you think “setting priorities” is a pleasant platitude, you don’t understand what it really is. “Setting priorities” is the brutal process of deciding which things won’t get done.

The 7 Principles of Unitarian Universalism

Note: This is a major November 10, 2019 update of the original November 18, 2012 blog post, adding my own take on things. I have the same content at “Miles Kimball on `The 7 Principles of Unitarian Universalism'“

I have mentioned on this blog that I am a Unitarian Universalist. The website for the Unitarian Universalist Association has a nice summary of the principles and sources of Unitarian Universalism. Let me reflect on what each one means to me. I’ll give the official statement uninterrupted, then comment. I hope that in, some measure, my blog reflects these principles.

There are seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Unitarian Universalism (UU) draws from many sources:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

These principles and sources of faith are the backbone of our religious community.

Let me discuss each principle in turn.

1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person: These days I feel keenly the denial from many quarters of full humanity to those born elsewhere, particularly if they are poor and don’t yet speak English well. One of my best statements about immigration is “"The Hunger Games" Is Hardly Our Future--It's Already Here.” I also have a sermon on the general tendency to divide the world into “Us and Them.”

For economists, a routine way of denying the inherent worth and dignity of each person is to do a cost-benefit or welfare analysis, that without comment, puts a weight of zero on non-citizens. My alternative is “The Aluminum Rule”:

When acting collectively–or considering collective actions–put a weight on the welfare of human beings outside the in-group at least one-hundredth as much as the welfare of those in the in-group.

Because of the rampant poverty in the world, the Aluminum Rule would lead to dramatically different policies than putting a weight of zero on the out-group.

2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relationships: When I read the words “justice,” and “equity,” I think of John Rawls’s book A Theory of Justice, which to me points toward the broader class of mathematically formal social welfare functions—which is a serious research interest of mine in my work with Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Kristen Cooper toward building national well-being indexes.

Beyond that, “justice” to me means this principle, distilled from blogging my way through on liberty and John Locke’s 2d Treatise—see “John Stuart Mill’s Defense of Freedom” and also “Miles Kimball on John Locke's Second Treatise,” from which the following quotation is taken:

… no government action that clearly both reduces freedom and lowers overall social welfare is legitimate, regardless of what procedural rules have been followed in its enactment.

When, as is often the case, freedom is abridged in order to enrich the lives of the rich and impoverish the lives of the poor, it makes me burn with indignation. I give some examples of policies in this category that treated by all too many people as innocent in “‘Keep the Riffraff Out!’”

The word “compassion” makes me think of my own behavior much closer to home. Do I care about the people I deal with every day as much as I should? Do I strive to understand where they are coming from and what matters to them? (See “Liberty and the Golden Rule.”) Do I treat them right, both in doing my duty and looking for cases in which a modest effort on my part could benefit them greatly? Am I fulfilling my long-run duty to develop my social skills to the extent I reasonably can in order to be a warmer and more positive presence for others?

3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations: Each of us is different. Each of us has something that can be made fun of. Each of us could be made an outcast. I have my own stories of being treated at times as less than fully human because of my nerdly leanings. Those remembered moments still hurt, even decades later. Other people have their own stories of being made to feel less than fully human. To me “acceptance of one another” means a lot less of that happening.

To me, the interesting thing about “spiritual growth” is that I don’t know what it means. But that’s OK. As I wrote in “An Agnostic Grace”:

Religion is the “everything else” category in our existence in human societies and as individuals after parceling out the things people understand fairly well about human life—just as “natural philosophy” used to be the “everything else” category after parceling out as natural sciences the things people were beginning to understand fairly well about the natural world.

The same can be said for “spiritual” in the way it is used by nonsupernaturalists: “spiritual” refers to important things—many of them very, very positive—that we don’t fully understand yet. Spiritual growth is coming to a somewhat better understanding of those things and using that understanding to better our lives. To encourage one another in spiritual growth requires a sensitivity to things others are striving for or struggling with that may be hard for them to articulate. Let’s respect the things that people feel in their gut but can’t yet express very well, and give time for words to be put to those things.

4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning: One of the glories of the U.S. Constitution is that it guarantees freedom of religion. (One of its shames was that it winked at slavery.) What is rare and precious beyond that is to have freedom of religious belief within the walls of a house of worship. I have that in Unitarian Universalism. I can believe as I believe and it is OK with everyone within a UU congregation. And I accord the same privilege to others. For example, I was fascinated rather than distressed to have Wiccan believers as full fellow members of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor.

Truth is a sacred word to me. I left my previous religion in large measure because I felt my religious leaders (including very high-ranking leaders) had lied to me. In my career as an economist, the sacredness of truth shows up in a strong desire to urge statistical practices that put the truth ahead of careerist scientific advancement or confirmation of an ideology.

“Meaning” suggest to me both deep introspection into my own values and “Leaving a Legacy” by doing good that extends beyond one’s immediate circle. But “meaning,” like “spiritual” also points to the transcendent things that I don’t understand very well. I would like more transcendence in my life, and I don’t have much of a clue what that means. But I think the quest for transcendence, in balance with my other values, will lead to something bright and beautiful.

5. The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large: To me democratic values, and “the right of conscience,” means that I don’t have to bow the knee to anyone (unless I choose to do so out of freely-arrived at, deeply-felt respect). Human beings have evolved adaptations for hierarchy. But it is possible for each of us to insist on being treated as an equal and to treat others as equals. There are many intellectually interesting issues—not all of them resolved—on the question of in what sense should we be treating one another as equals. But what I am sure of is that we can and should be insisting on equality and treating others as equal to a greater extent than we do.

6. The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all: War is hell. Slavery is hell. Poverty is hell. They are hell when they happen in other countries just as much as if they happen in ours. Working to make war, slavery and poverty much rarer than they are in the world is a noble goal. And having the world sliced up into pieces with a majority of the world’s people only allowed to go into a few of those pieces is truly unfortunate.

7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. As I get older, plants and nonhuman animals intrigue me more and more. Some of our quest for meaning is likely to run through a contemplation and appreciation of plants and other animals.

Now, our planet is in danger of getting distressingly hot due to human action. We should take that seriously with serious measures (such as a carbon tax or a worldwide ban on burning coal) that go far beyond the symbolic. This doesn’t mean that we need to turn against capitalism. The best ways to take care of our precious planet, with plants, other animals, and us on it, is by using the price system and the creative potential of capitalist institutions, along with appropriate government measures.

To me, “the interdependent web of all existence” also includes the rest of the universe beyond our planet. Particularly valuable for contemplation are the many planets now being discovered beyond our solar system. (See “Exoplanets and Faith.”)

Conclusion: Besides being repelled by lies, I left my previous religion for Unitarian Universalism because its theological underpinnings felt too small. I felt the universe, and even our still tentative understanding of the universe, had a grandeur missing from what I was taught in that Church. When I was still a believer in Mormonism, I resolved (in the abstract) that I would only leave it for something that was bigger and better. Although Unitarian Universalism has a certain minimalism to it, it not only allows, but encourages the freedom of thought that allows all the best and and most wonderful thinking that has been done throughout human history in. That is truly grand.


Don’t miss these Unitarian-Universalist sermons by Miles:

By self-identification, I left Mormonism for Unitarian Universalism in 2000, at the age of 40. I have had the good fortune to be a lay preacher in Unitarian Universalism. I have posted many of my Unitarian-Universalist sermons on this blog.



Also, you can see other posts on religion, philosophy, humanities, culture and science by clicking on this link:

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/tagged/religionhumanitiesscience

Reihan Salam: "Miles Kimball on How Electronic Currency Could Yield True Price Stability" →

In his November 6, 2012 post on National Review Online, Reihan Salam begins this way:

Miles Kimball has written a stimulating, and quite convincing, short article for Quartz arguing that governments should swap electronic currency for physical currency as the “unit of account,” i.e., as the “yardstick for prices and other economic values.” While paper currency could be retained for everyday transactions, its value would fluctuate relative to  the electronic currency that would serve as an anchor.

And I especially like his later phrase:

Kimball’s discussion is nuanced…

In addition to his November 26 post, Reihan also tweeted this today:

I’m a big fan of the @mileskimball to replace paper money with electronic money as the unit of account: http://qz.com/21797/the-case-for-electric-money-the-end-of-inflation-and-recessions-as-we-know-it/ …