Feb 17 2009
Response to A Thoughtful Critic of The Plan
From an email exchange with TPM founder Neal Katz:
A few people have asked me what I think of the Prosperity Mandate, so I spent a little while looking into it and thought I would give you my impressions directly.
Frankly, I am highly skeptical of the proposal. Though I haven’t read it in exhaustive detail (and don’t expect to be able to spend a lot of time on it), there are very many moving parts that would need to come together, and even if implemented, with no assurance they could be built quickly to scale. The complexity is actually very high. Too high, I believe. As a former entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I learned to be very leery of deals that require many key things to come together to work because there are too many potential points of failure (ie high risk that is hard to mitigate) and it is hard to truly evaluate all the interactions and how they will play out.
NEAL: I can’t imagine a National Monetary Policy that would get us out of our current economic crisis not being fairly ‘complicated with a lot of moving parts’. Seriously, can you? If so, I would like to see how.
