Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema | Conversations with Tyler

Video Description

Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found his largest audience through blogging in his 50s and 60s, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet this unconventional journey led him to become one of the most influential monetary thinkers of the past two decades. Scott joins Tyler to discuss what reading Depression-era newspapers revealed about Hitler's rise, when fiat currency became viable, why Sweden escaped the worst of the 1930s crash, whether bimetallism ever made sense, where he'd time-travel to witness economic history, what 1920s Hollywood movies get wrong about their era, how he developed his famous maxim "never reason from a price change," whether the Fed can ever truly follow policy rules like NGDP targeting, if Congress shapes monetary policy more than we think, the relationship between real and nominal shocks, his favorite Hitchcock movies, why Taiwan's 90s cinema was so special, how Ozu gets better with age, whether we'll ever see another Bach or Beethoven, how he ended up at the University of Chicago, what it means to be a late bloomer in academia, and more. Recorded December 27, 2024 Transcript and links: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/scott-sumner/ Stay connected: Follow us on X, IG, and Facebook: @cowenconvos https://www.twitter.com/cowenconvos https://www.facebook.com/cowenconvos https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt https://conversationswithtyler.com https://mercatus.org Timestamps 00:00:00 - On analyzing world events in real time 00:03:34 - On when in history fiat currency became viable 00:13:03 - On NGDP targeting 00:21:16 - On the causes and response to the 2008 financial crisis 00:34:39 - On China’s monetary policy 00:43:50 - On never reasoning from price changes 00:46:20 - On movies 01:02:59 - On the Scott Sumner origin story