It was recently brought to my attention that Eliezer Yudkowsky regards the monetary theories of Scott Sumner (short overview) to be (what we might call) a "correct contrarian cluster", or an island of sanity when most experts (though apparently a decreasing number) believe the opposite.
I would be interested in knowing why. To me, Sumner's views are a combination of:
a) Goodhart's folly ("Historically, an economic metric [that nobody cared about until he started talking about] has been correlated with economic goodness; if we only targeted this metric with policy, we would get that goodness. Here are some plausible mechanisms why ..." -- my paraphrase, of course)
b) Belief that "hoarded" money is pure waste with no upside. (For how long? A day? A month?)
If you are likewise surprised by Eliezer's high regard for these theories, please join me in encouraging him to explain his reasoning.
To address your (a) comment, some countries have implemented close approximations to NGDP level targeting after the 2008 crisis, and have done well. They include most obviously Iceland (despite a severe financial crisis), and some less obvious instances like Australia, Poland and Isreal. One could point to the UK as the clearest counterexample, but just about everyone agrees that they have severe structural problems, which NGDPLT is not intended to address. And even then, monetary easing has allowed the conservative government to implement fiscal austeri...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.