The perils of economic centrism in a polarised world

It’s not easy being a centrist economist in today’s polarised, social-media-driven world, where every idea is quickly forced into one ideological camp or another.

- KENNETH ROGOFF

To paraphrase a remark often attributed to Leon Trotsky, centrist economists may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them.

My 2016 book The Curse of Cash, which explored the past, present, and future of money, isa case in point. After its publication, Ireceived more than 20 death threats, some clearly from drug dealers and gun owners outraged by my call to phase out $100 bills, and others from crypto evangelists who considered my support for regulation an act of treason.

Oddly enough, Ididn’t mind the threats as muchasone might expect. Asunhinged as some of these people were, at least they had understood the book’s arguments; they just vehemently disagreed with them.

The same cannot be said of the 2013 uproar over my work with Carmen MReinhart. That episode began when three University of Massachusetts Amherst economists argued that our six-page 2010 conference paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” contained multiple “errors” that had supposedly misled policymakers in Europeand the United States into adopting harmful austerity measures in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The ensuing outrage fostered a false narrative that persists to this day.