Sorry, missed your reply. He's quite a well respected economist, and also presenter of the Pushkin podcast Cautionary Tales along with a lot of economics adjacent stuff for BBC radio and TV. Didn't mean for my question to sound snarky but on reflection I think it does, so sorry about that.
Not at all, even if there was snark intended I think its a fair question.
I resisted ranting about it (I hope you'll indulge me now), but in general I don't much like the economics commentariat. As best I can tell, "respectability" seems to mean something like "modal economic views + left of center politics." There are of course some exceptions, e.g. occasionally the economist or WSJ, but it leads to some notable blind spots.
For example, Switzerland experienced mild deflation in a good economy 2012-2017, but it wasn't until 2023 or so that articles started coming out that questioned where the 2% inflation target came from [0] and whether deflation could ever be a good thing [1]. This was despite respectable research from at least 2004 that explored the possibility of "good" deflation [2].
Tim, like many in the commentariat, was writing about inflation in 2019 [3]. The title of this essay is "Why inflation is good for us," and discusses the merits of inflation without any real discussion of cases where deflation could be good. At the end, he even raises the idea of a 4% rate target, which is a tad funny knowing the political mood on inflation 2021-24.
My point, really, is that I suspect I know most of his opinions without reading much of his work. He's hardly unique in that regard, but it bothers me. When looking for interesting opinions I'd probably look elsewhere.
All perfectly fair. I tend to start from the point of view that economists are all great at telling us why something happened but terrible at telling us what will happen.
