En un interesante post en Free Banking Blog George Selgin relaciona las confusiones y falta de conocimiento histórico en materia monetaria con los incentivos de la académica (al menos en Estados Unidos.) Ciertamente, temas de banca y dinero deben ser de los más confundidos en economía (quizás empatado con problemas de epistemología de la economía..????)

Para sugerir que es necesario un banco central para la estabilidad del sistema financiero se tiene que tener una teoría de banca libre. En general esta es una teoría (o concepción) implícita, no explícita. Esto genera dos problemas. En primer lugar posiblemente sea una concepción mal informada. En segundo lugar, se vuelve una concepción «irrefutable.»

Un pasaje de Selgin:

Consider, if you will, your typical fresh PhD, having monetary or (more commonly) macroeconomics as a specialty, as might have been disgorged by any save a handful of the doctoral programs in the U.S. sometime during, say, the last 30 years. In all likelihood that graduate never took a class on economic history, let alone one on monetary history or (least likely of all) the history of economic thought. Nor is he or she likely to have become familiar with even present day monetary institutions through any other coursework, most of which is devoted to mastering either statistical methods or highly abstract models. As for the monetary sequence itself, it is likely to have involved toying with Overlapping Generations models, which don’t even get the definition of money right, or Woodford-style neo-Wicksellian economics, which (unlike the Swedish real McCoy) strives to avoid using the «m» word altogether. Some better students, to be sure, will make up for the lack of institutional meat in their bland graduate-school porridge by grabbing the occasional vitamin from the library. But even when I went to school (NYU, class of ’86), that sort of thing was relatively rare. Today, to judge from the many grad students I talk to, a student who dare’s to do it, besides risking failure by having less time left to study for prelims, is sure to be regarded as a weirdo.

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