Thread: This brief @PilkingtonPhil note on Gunnar Myrdal's _Monetary Equilibrium_ is indeed very good. That work (which helped earn Myrdal the Nobel he shared w/ Hayek) Some follow-up remarks here.

As Phil notes, Myrdal was a member of the Stockholm School, whose contributions to monetary theory built upon the work of Knut Wicksell, the school's founder. In By 1931, when _Monetary Equilibrium_ appeared, a (polite) rift had separated the school in two.
The rift began with a debate between Wicksell and David Davidson concerning the sort of price stability implied by a policy of keeping interest rates at their "natural" levels. Wicksell of course claimed that this would result in stable _output_ prices.
Davidson instead argued for a "productivity norm," with the stable factor prices, which would have the output price index move inversely with factor productivity.
Eli Heckscher and Gustav Cassel were among the more well-known Swedes who sided with Wicksell. Myrdal, in contrast, was , as did many those who sided with Davidson. (Hayek, by the way, also shared Davidson's opinion, as did many non-Swedes. See https://t.co/dlJQFqLbIL.)
Although many (myself among them) believe that the Davidson gang had the better arguments, the Riksbank ultimately went the (output) price-level stability route. David Laidler has an excellent paper on this: https://t.co/Th9MV1U3De. )See also https://t.co/LU6DUFi1gd)
One of Myrdal's particular contributions to the debate was his claim that stabilizing factor prices made more sense, because factor prices tend to be stickier than final goods prices. The less the former have to adjust, the fewer episodes of monetary disequilibrium.
As anyone conversant with the modern macro. literature knows, Davidson-Wicksell debate is still raging! https://t.co/uittss25vN
Phil addresses some important differences between Myrdal's analysis in _Monetary Equilibrium_ and that of Keynes's _General Theory_. One he doesn't point out is that Keynes took the Wicksellian view. But it's clear that Keynes's was torn on the issue.
As I've noted in comparing Keynes's position on this matter with Hayek's (Hayek's of the 1930s, that is), Keynes's came within an ace of embracing the Davidson "productivity norm" view: https://t.co/zTkGa1bwMW
Finally--and importantly--the productivity norm/factor price stability ideal amounts in practice to a form of nominal income targeting, and as such is akin to the NGDP targeting recommended by @MoneyIllusion, @DavidBeckworth, @MaMoMVPY, and others.
So I say we award ol' Gunnar an honorary NGDP targeting mug. How about it, @DavidBeckworth?

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Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.