Here is Alan Blinder in a paper – “Issues in the Coordination of Monetary and Fiscal Policy” – from 1982:

“Consider the problem of designing a car in which student drivers will be taught to drive. The car will have two steering wheels and two sets of brakes. One way to achieve “coordination” is to design the car so that one set of controls – the teacher’s – can always override the other. And it may seem obvious that this is the correct thing to do in this case.”

The student driver obviously is fiscal policy, while the teacher is monetary policy. If the student (fiscal policy) try to take the car (the economy) in one direction the teacher (monetary policy) can always step in and overrule him. This is of course the Sumner Critique – monetary policy will always have the final say on the level of aggregate demand/nominal GDP and hence the fiscal multiplier is zero if the central bank for example targets the nominal GDP level or inflation and that is even the case if the world is assumed to be Keynesian in nature.

However, even though monetary policy has the final say that does not mean that monetary policy will conducted in the right fashion or as Blinder express it:

“But now suppose that we do not know in advance who will sit in which seat. Or what if the teacher, while a superior driver, has terrible eyesight? Under these conditions it is no longer obvious that we want one set of controls to be able to ovemde the other. Reasoning that a stalemate may be better than a violent collision, we may decide that it is best to design the car with two sets of competing controls which can partially offset one another.”

Blinder here raises an interesting question – what if the central bank does not conduct monetary policy in a proper fashion wouldn’t it then be better to give the fiscal authority the possibility to try it’s luck. Blinder is of course right there is no guarantee that the central bank will do a good job – if that was the case then we would not be in this crisis. However, does that mean that fiscal policy can “take over”? Obviously not – even a bad central bank can overrule the fiscal authority when it comes to aggregate demand. The ECB is doing that on a daily basis.

Anyway, I really just wanted to remind my readers of Blinder’s paper. It is really not directly about the Sumner Critique, but rather Alan Blinder is discussing coordination between monetary policy and fiscal policy from a game theoretical perspective. Even though Blinder obviously as a lot more faith in “government design” than I have the paper is quite interesting in terms of the games central banks an governments play against (and sometimes with) each other. I find Blinder’s discussion highly relevant for particularly the game being played in the euro zone today between the ECB and European governments about monetary easing versus fiscal consolidation.

William Nordhaus in 1994 wrote a similar paper to Blinder’s about “Policy Games: Coordination and Independence in Monetary and Fiscal Policies”. Nordhaus’ paper is equally relevant to today’s discussion.

It seems like the game theoretical literature about monetary-fiscal policy coordination has somewhat disappeared today, but to me these topics are more relevant that ever. If my readers are aware of any newer literature on this topic I would be very happy to hear about it.

PS the literature apparently not completely dead – here is a 2010 dissertation on the same topic by Helton Saulo B. Dos Santos. I have not read it, but it looks quite interesting.

Update: Nick Rowe has kindly reminded me that he and Simon Power actually have written a paper on the same topic back in 1998. Nick recently did a blog post about his paper. Nick interesting enough reaches the same conclusion as I do that in a Stackelberg setting where the government sets the budget deficit first and the central bank follows and determine NGDP we get a outcome similar to the Sumner Critique. Again this is not due to monetarist assumptions about the structure the economy (the LM curve does not have to be vertical), but rather due to the game theoretical setting.